| The Async-First Playbook |
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Author: Sumeet Gayathri Moghe The driver behind this book was the pandemic and the need to find ways to make remote working effective for teams. So does the book fulfil its subtitle of "Remote collaboration techniques for Agile software teams"? Part One of the book is titled 'Adapting to the new normal', and it opens with a 'day in the life' story about a developer who gets up at 6.25, drives her son to school to fit in with the local schoolday, then works till 11pm to account for the Bangalore working day. Her day is filled with meetings, team huddles, and trying to fit life around the demands of deadlines. Having set out the problems, Moghe then asks "is there a better way to work?", to see whether the work practices that have been copied wholesale from office to remote working are all appropriate. The concept of asynchronous working, where people in a team might be in different locations and time zones, but co-operate on a project, is at the heart of the book. Chapter one, titled "there's got to be a better way to work," will resonate with most developers who've juggled deadlines and endless meetings. It makes the argument that asynchronous work has the potential to transform distributed software development to be fun, sustainable, inclusive and scalable. Chapter 2 has the title 'foster a mindset for change', and it looks at how to get a team of developers ready to move to be able to work in an async-first way. 
Part Two of the book is titled "Prepare to go Async-first". It opens with a chapter on what tools you need before going on to look at the biggest Async-first superpower - documentation. Three more async superpowers are then discussed- block distractions, read and comprehend, and work independently. You could argue that none of this is revolutionary, but the ideas are clearly explained. A chapter on collaboration protocols and how they can be used to create a calm working environment brings this part of the book to a close. A meaty section titled 'the practitioner's guide' comes next. The chapter titles illustrate clearly the author's views - meetings as a last resort is followed by "the value of being face to face", which might sound counter-intuitive for a book praising remote working, but the author argues that occasional face to face meetings offer a powerful way to team build. This is followed by an interesting chapter on how small steps can be used to move away from synchronous to asynchronous working.
Part five of the book looks at async leadership, with chapters on questions you should ask yourself such as how can you be an example, not a bottleneck; and how can you avoid busywork? Other chapters look at managing people with care, and making use of tacit knowledge in your company. A section titled 'navigate the pitfalls' considers where async working goes wrong, starting with the difficulties of hybrid working rather than trying to be a more truly async team. This is followed by an interesting exploration of what happens when you're the only async team in an organization and how you can mitigate the problems. The section ends with a chapter on what can go wrong and how 'toxic behaviors' can arise. The book ends with a short section on bringing it all together, including a 'starter kit' for how to set up a team that works asynchronously. This is a well-written book, with examples that resonate. I enjoyed reading it, and as someone who has worked in asynchronous teams most of my working life, I agreed with most of the points raised. If you are a manager who needs to manage an asynchronous team, there will be useful tips in the book. However, given that teams tend only work asynchronously when outside circumstances force them to, I doubt whether the book will persuade anybody not forced into that situation to change. To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.
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