Many office workers around the world have heard this term. Most businesses preexisting the digital age realized the switch to virtual was inevitable. The goal of doing it all by 2020 seemed sufficiently far away in order to get things done and get the corporate culture changed.

Since then open office, flexible work from home policy, online collaboration, agile transformation, have all seen its share of haters but just like with everything else, vigilant companies looking outside-in moved forward, adapted, and evolved as the culture and customer needs changed. Those proud of their legacy of looking inside-out became obsolete.

For many businesses, growth is a process of evolution, for others a revolution. Some fully transformed the corporate culture to embrace cloud-based collaboration and work-life balance, others stopped at introducing a virtual meeting tool. Where a company is on this spectrum can make it or break it in the times like mandatory work-from-home (quarantine).

The often-cited misconception about remote working being less productive has been debunked study after study, though individuals who depend on physical interaction, are unable to use or learn new digital tools, struggle with change. Afterall, work-life balance, online sharing, digital-nomad-like lifestyle is a millennial thing. Right?

Regardless, here is the list of tools and services I personally use to enable maximal efficacy when working with disparate teams. For as long as the team culture embraces these methods, one can be on the moon and still be accountable and deliver maximal value to their organization.

Collaboration

The most crucial part of the puzzle is collaboration and a team’s ability to transfer words into digital artifacts. Collaborating on artifacts is as efficient as the tools used. Good tools are always the ones that allow teams to swarm an artifact and see each other’s changes in real-time.

Most efficient 3 are:

Google Docs — Including draw.io. Create and edit text documents, spreadsheets, architectural diagrams, and presentations right in your browser — no dedicated software required. Multiple people can work at the same time, and every change is saved automatically.

Box — Good alternative to Dropbox. Upload docs and track versioning allow online editing of Word and Excel using Office 365 web plugin. Sync docs to the local machine. Allow easy sharing of file links and the creation of collaboration folders.

Confluence (or any wiki-like tool) — Collaborate on artifacts that capture project requirements, assign tasks to specific users, and manage several calendars at once. Version track changes and fluid up-to-date live product/project

Some more: Figma. Monday, Sketch for Teams, InVision Cloud Prototyping

Communication

Top 3 communication tools based on my personal use and experience in order of efficacy:

Slack or Flock — Chat tool ideal for general communication with handy developer features. Extensive API integration with just about any service you can think of. #1 for a reason.

Microsoft Teams — Chat tool for general communication, with some collaboration options and Microsoft Office tools integration.

Webex Teams — Chat tool, with very beta Webex conferencing tool integration.

Delivery

Lean delivery framework — Lean offers a solid conceptual framework, values, and principles, as well as good practices, derived from experience, that support agile organizations. I wrote about lean methods here

Cloud utilization — It is not a secret that I am an AWS fan, but for the right reasons. While all other cloud providers are focusing on milking their customers for profit, AWS is focused on optimization of scale. They don’t want to sell you more resources. They make sure the ones you need are properly utilized.

CI/CD and DevSecOps — It all boils down to applying technology in a way that is removing obstacles of scale (or automating them), understanding that Ops is an integral part of Dev thus — DevOps + Security in the middle = DevSecOps

Cloud Security

The best way to secure something is to put it in the basement, lock the door, and bury the key. This translates into business as requiring employees to be on-site, tethered to a physical network, using office computers, saving work on in-office servers, preventing or reducing what employees can do online. Those workers struggle a great deal with being efficient outside of the office.

Perimeter security and VPN does not really work anymore either. VPNs only protect against eavesdropping. They’re useless against already-infected devices.

Security by obscurity is not a good security model, and most companies struggle with exposing, but protecting company resources. Rather than securing devices, the modern company focus is on securing its data, and if the federal government can do it, anyone can.

Cloud platforms have made great strides in the creation of highly secure Cloud Business Office (CBO) services. Here are a few:

Amazon WorkDocs — Fully managed secure content creation, storage, and collaboration service.

Microsoft Office 365 — With federated Microsoft Sign-in, Azure Active Directory, Microsoft Graph, Azure Logic Apps, and other functions, it can be made into a compelling virtual office setup.

Cisco Virtual Office — It provides an office-like experience with voice, video teleconferencing, and wants you to buy hardware to install in our home.