Thoughts on Asynchronous Communication

Lately I have been reading about Asynchronous Communication. It is an interesting topic to me because it plays an importantly role in working remotely. What is Asynchronous Communication? Here is a definition I really like:

Asynchronous communication is the art of communicating and moving projects forward without the need for additional stakeholders to be available at the same time your communique is sent.

Embracing Asynchronous Communication by GitLab

Examples of Asynchronous Communication

A number of activities we do regularly, falls into the category of Asynchronous Communication. In addition, advancements in technology have been making them easier to do. We do these activities to avoid long and draining meetings, control our focus, manage timezone differences, and work with more flexibility in how we allocate our working hours.

Collaborating in Documents

Google has made it easy for us to share documents with others. Software like Google Docs, Spreadsheets, and Slides, make it easy for us to help one another in writing documents. These tools allow us to give others, editor or commenter access to documents we share with them. This is one form of Asynchronous Communication.

We do this when we want to get feedback for what we have written. We share the document and grant commenter privileges and our colleagues can read it at their own time and post comments on the document for us. We do not need to come together for a meeting, we just set expectations on when we want to get the feedback.

We do this when we write a document together with our co-workers. We share edit privileges and everyone contributes to the content being written. Again, we do not have to be in a meeting to do this together. Each contributor takes the responsibility of reading what has been written so far, checking the history of the document, editing what they want to change, and adding more content. Each person can do this at their own pace just as long as it falls within the expectations of the group on when they want to finish the document. In other cases, writing may never be “done”, the document evolves over time.

Chatting

Chatting can be a form of Asynchronous Communication. When you send a message with the expectation that it is ok if the recipient does not respond immediately, that is Asynchronous Communication. Sometimes people would also say that they are busy and they will get back to the chat message as soon as they can. This century, chatting has become a natural form of communication for everyone.

An important behavior to develop is managing when we respond to chats. You can manage the way you are notified by your chat tools. Working agreements can be set to have a shared understanding about responding to chats. You can set the appropriate status (like busy) in your profile. It is very important as well to just have only one chat tool used by the company / organization. You don’t want the burden of using and managing multiple tools.

Emails

I think it is unfortunate how email got a bad rep over the years. It doesn’t help that the marketing for collaboration tools commonly say “they should replace email”, “better than email”, “don’t bother with emails”. I consider email to still be an important form of Asynchronous Communication. I think if you manage your inbox properly you can leverage the advantages of using email.

I find emails helpful in collaborating on straightforward tasks or mini-projects. One recent experience I have in using emails for this kind of effort, is when my fellow Agile Coach and I were tasked with finding a good online Kanban tool. Our boss gave us the details of the task and instructions in an email. We did not have questions because it was all clear and the criteria for a “good tool” were well-defined. We were also given candidates to look at. I responded thru email to accept the task and give an estimate of how long it will take me to finish my assessment. My fellow Agile Coach responded in the same way. The next email we sent individually included the results of our assessments. From the results there was clearly a winner among the tools and we have made our pick. We did not meet, we just exchanged emails.

Training Videos

For teaching and sharing knowledge, training videos have become indispensable. The investment in making the videos can easily be paid off by the reusability of the training provided by the videos. It feels good when you have control over how you go through the training sessions. When you feel you need to review a part of the training, you can just rewatch it. Sure you lose the ability to interact with the trainer and other participants but most of the time you don’t need that. Most of the time you just need to digest the knowledge from the videos and apply it in your work. For internal trainings, the trainers could make time for conversations with the participants easily as they work together.

Pros and Cons of Asynchronous Communication

Let’s start with a list of advantages first:

• You can manage when you would allocate the time to digest information and make a response – as long as it is within the agreed expectations of people you work with
• You can avoid unnecessary meetings, freeing you from scheduling challenges and conflicts
• You can avoid disruptions – for you, as well as for your colleagues
• You have a recorded history of changes and exchanges, most tools you would use for Asynchronous Communication provides this feature

And then here are some disadvantages I can think of:

• Things will “fall through the cracks“ if you and your workmates don’t have discipline to follow-through with agreements on Asynchronous Communication
• You might misuse Asynchronous Communication
• Requires managing and organizing of numerous files, online resources, and tools
• You may forget to respond, participate and provide feedback

The disadvantages I listed can be overcome if you and your colleagues have a shared understanding of working agreements, ownership for the success of your group, and a great sense of responsibility.

Closing thoughts

There are many other forms of Asynchronous Communication besides the ones I have discussed here in this post. The ones I wrote about are the forms I commonly use. Perhaps on another post I’ll talk about the other forms I know of.

Asynchronous Communication does not mean to eliminate meetings. It helps us in avoiding unnecessary meetings and saving time and effort. It makes us ask if we really a need a meeting, and consider other forms of communication which may be better suited for the need that we have.

One Tool to Rule Them All

Processes and tools may be valued less compared to individuals and interactions as stated in the Agile Manifesto, but when you are working with remote teams they still play a crucial role. I am often asked about the tools which I use to support being Agile while working remotely so I thought of describing the tools here on this blog.

LeanKit

We use LeanKit for our online Kanban board. I like how you can easily configure your board in LeanKit so that you can make sure to have a good visualization of your process and how work flows through it. I am amazed at how the tool can render a huge Kanban board, with lots of cards on it, and make it easy to view. The tool also offers helpful reporting pages so you can gain insight on how to improve and make changes to your process. The tool’s Speed report will give you data about throughput and cycle times and the Flow report page will let you see the cumulative flow diagram, helping you observe how work flows through your process.

There are still a number of improvements to the tool which I would like to see. The searching feature can certainly be made to be better by making it easier to look for cards which have been archived, perhaps by providing more search filters. A visual indication on the card when there is a new comment posted on it would be helpful. The linking of cards feature to be made more accessible, it is currently restricted to higher level account types.

Atlassian Tools – JIRA, Confluence, Bitbucket, Bamboo

JIRA was the first online project management tool I have been able to use. Over the years Atlassian have made steady progress in improving their suite of tools. The integration of their tools work well and makes linking of project resources easy to manage. I was happy that they deployed their tool on the cloud, previously you would have to install JIRA and Confluence instances on your own web server.

Slack, Skype, Google Hangouts… oh my!

You got to have that one messenger tool which you use to chat with your teammates. It would be great if your messenger tool would allow you to have online calls with people or groups of people. Skype is the tool which I have used the most. I also use Slack for its capability to retain a good amount of history of messages, plus it allows you to share files, links, videos and pictures easily.

Most of the messenger tools available right now, all have the features you would expect to need.

Planningpoker.com

It is very fun to play Planning Poker with the team while you are all together in a room. When you are doing this on an online meeting, it is still somehow fun and Planningpoker.com helps you enjoy it more. The tool has a nice and clean UI. The moderator of the game should have an account while the other players don’t need accounts. A link provided by the moderator will let you open the tool on your browser and join the game. There are various pointing scales you can use such as: Fibonacci series, t-shirt sizes, etc. There is also an option to create your own customized scale (if you have the proper account type). There are settings you can tweak like allowing players to freely change their vote and if you want to auto-flip cards once everyone has selected their estimate.

GroupMap

I have been introduced to GroupMap by one of my workmates. During that time he was new to the team and recommended this tool for our retrospective meetings. GroupMap offers a cool way of brainstorming on ideas while all of you are remote. It is an online tool that you can use to create an idea map which you will edit collaboratively with others. We use this mostly on retrospective meetings where we have maps with sections for common retro questions. As a team we answer the questions, list down items, see what others have written, post comment on items, and have our discussion around them. The tool has settings you can tweak like: the different steps of your map (brainstorm, vote, group, action items). For each step you can select options such as if everyone can see items written by one another, or how many votes do each participant get. It is quite easy to learn how to use the tool and it has nice friendly UI. I am very happy to get to know this tool and be able to add it to my utility belt.

GoTo Meeting

Our go-to online meeting app (no pun intended). We use this for almost every team meetings: standups, backlog grooming, retrospectives, etc. GTM, as we call it, provides a reliable online meeting tool, giving you clear audio and nice screen sharing features. For screen sharing you can choose to share your entire screen or select specific windows to share (useful for hiding side chats you got going, hehe). You can also mark-up the screen being shared to annotate it as needed, which is very nice for when you want to highlight something on the screen. Attendees don’t need to have accounts to join the meeting, they just need to click on the URL for joining a meeting, which is shared by the organizer. The organizer should have an account with LogMeIn, the provider of GTM.

On occasion I would have trouble with GTM but it is mostly because of my poor internet connection during those times. Although sometimes GTM servers seem to be unresponsive and it is troublesome to start meetings and get in them.

One tool to bring them all…

There is no “one tool” which will fit all your needs in being Agile while working remotely. It is great that there are a multitude of options to choose from. Pick the set of tools which you, and the teams you work with, are most comfortable with. That way you can focus on continuously improving to become more Agile.