I enjoyed the read and will mention it to teams I know that are trying to move to remote. Has a lot of good lessons in it
Do you feel like the times of punching in a time card should die?
Have you ever wondered, how many time and energy does you and everyone in your team lose every day, just on commuting to the office? Waking up earlier. Dressing in a business casual way (whatever it means). Finally commuting. At least one hour a day took away!
All this just for a sake of punching in a time card and sitting in front of the computer. Maybe also attending to some useless meetings.
Did you ever catch yourself crazy early in the morning or late at night in the office, just to work without any interruptions?
Do you feel that workplaces haven’t changed for over a century?
Truly great advices driven by experience that you could fill in ten agile conferences. Here it is packed in one book. It is sometimes against your well known approach to software development. Well suited for both developers and project managers. Most solutions are easy to perform but not easy for some of us to just start, to change our mind. Because it requires trust. You have this gut feeling… You know the book is right. It’s obvious. You just have to forget what you thought was good and start doing it in the right way from now on.
Is it only about being remote?
Being remote is a great thing. But, it won’t work if your way of working isn’t right. Just abandoning an office won’t work.
There should be no expectations of you to be in-sync, available all the time. It is likely that effectiveness of your job depends on being able to focus on a single task for a longer period of time.
That’s what being asynchronous means. You can respond to something client or colleague requested in few hours. It doesn’t need to be now.
I wish I had read this book three years ago, when we started working in Agile-way. Thanks to ‘Async Remote’ we could have avoided many pitfalls on the way.
Working process
You may even want to create a perfect environment for your organization to be remote and async. It means, that your working process must fit it. And as you might have guessed, a standard way may not be the best.
Is your work driven by stories? Are you actively shaping your client’s business? Or are you just executing requirements?
Are you always sure about what you need to do next in your project? Are your priorities always clear? Are you deciding on your priorities?
Do you struggle with dealing with huge tasks? Do estimates and deadlines produce too much stress?
Are you feeling guilty of guesstimating?
Technology is exponentially changing society. Workplaces are transforming to catch on. The best knowledge workers have broken free. “Async Remote” introduces you to the mind of A players passionatly collaborating freely on the other side. Adapt or be left behind.
We deserve something better
We are against the status quo of the industry. We spent last years developing our way of working. We managed to get extraordinary results with it and we wanted to share it.
What if you could spend more time on what you love? Imagine yourself spending more time with your family or on your hobbies.
What if you could be a part of a self-organizing team?
This book is for…
…Software developers
Are you tired of working in the same area of code and the same feature for a long time? Days or sometimes even weeks? Feeling disconnected from other team members? That’s a sign that something needs to change.
We will show you how small changes in the process that you can push for, can help you deal with those struggles. Working on your project should not be stressful.
You can deliver something valuable even twice a day and be proud of it.
Let’s face it. Lack of self-growth is boring. Professionals invest in their skills. When we learn at home, we don’t spend time with our family and diminish our hobby. We want to learn at work.
Is it possible?
Yes! But we need a workflow which will embrace that fact. It needs to give us a chance to work on the parts of the code, that we are not most skilled at. Back-end developers can help by doing front-end related tasks. And vice versa. They just need to get a chance.
Confusion in this area costs the project’s money and client’s happiness. We prefer clarity. But we are often not so sure about current priorities. We would like to work on tasks that are most important right now and deliver the biggest value to the client.
Are you a self-organizing team and do you want to estimate, plan and track your work without the support of a project manager? Async Remote gives you lot’s of valuable ideas on how to do it!
…Managers
We will help you manage the priorities on a daily basis. You will be able to navigate between upcoming problems and occurring opportunities quicker.
We provide a recipe for dealing with huge tasks. How can a team approach it, when having all team members working on a big, new task.
We will teach you how to have a low barrier for developers to enter the project. They will be more mobile across different projects that your company is working on. We show how to cut the risk that the project faces when one of the developers gets sick or is going to leave the team.
… Both
The whole point of the book is to make everyone autonomous. They need to be able to figure out the priorities on their own.
Managers aren’t only here to babysit developers and make sure they have anything to do. They need to work with developers, not in subordinate-superior structure. They should be an equal partner in a team structure.
Managers will find out how to deal with huge tasks. They can work together with developers in a process of priority and tasks management. And often, they won’t be a need for the project to go on.
Programmers will be happy with more variety in work. Our methods reduce the bus factor. It is easier to introduce new developer to a team.
And above it all, there is our starting point - a remote and asynchronous workplace. You don’t need to be in an office in a fixed hours. You can spend time with your family in the afternoon and work in more loose hours.
What’s in the book?
- How to provide business value to customers and be able to learn new things at work. Can you start learning frontend when you are a backend developer, or the other way around?
- Small stories. What’s their value and what kind of problems do they solve?
- How to deal with positive and negative risks that affect IT projects so that people are always working on the most important task right now.
- The rule that makes programmers more effective at selecting next tasks.
- Developers talking to clients and creating tickets. Trully collaborative nature of work.
- The life without Project Managers. Can it exist? How can developers become more independent?
- Over-communication. Why do you need to communicate differently when working remotely?
- Continuous deployment. Step by step guidance.
- Green Build. Must be.
- Screencasts, as a way to share knowledge in company.
- Communication tools, especially for remote workers.
- Async Standups - how to.
- And much more…
About authors
Robert Pankowecki is Ruby on Rails developer, working remotely for more than four years. At Arkency he’s worked on number of web projects in collaboration with small startups as well as large corporations. The creator of active_reload library which made your Rails apps faster in development mode.
Andrzej Krzywda is the CEO of Arkency. Working remotely since 2007 with over 10 years of experience in Ruby on Rails applications. The author of Fearless Refactoring: Rails Controllers ebook.