READING NOTE · UPDATED 2026
Make cross-location hand-offs visible
Distributed delivery depends on more than a common board or a meeting schedule. Clarify who owns the outcome, where decisions wait and how feedback reaches the people doing the work. The original offshore Agile discussion can be used to inspect these conditions. Avoid assuming that location alone explains a coordination problem.
A practical next step
- Trace one change across locations and time zones.
- Record a decision or review delay at a hand-off.
- Agree a small coordination experiment and inspect its effect.
This 2026 reading note is written by the Durnall editorial team. Richard Durnall’s original text follows below.
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Source capture · 2014-02-19 ↗I’ve never been a fan of offshore development. I’ve never been a fan of distributed development. I lose patience if the development team can’t see the customer, let alone live in a different building or city. I’ve had first hand experience of moving to an offshore model from both my time at British Airways and FoMoCo and I’ve never been convinced by the business case; the piece price may be cheaper but the value has always been questionable in my opinion.
I’ve changed my mind though. I’m currently running an offshore Agile project for a client, my first delivery gig in a couple of years, and I have to say I’m impressed. I’m working with the client on-site in Melbourne while the rest of the team are based in our office in Beijing.
On first instinct you’d have to guess that the distance would make an Agile process unworkable as it’s an immediate barrier to collaboration. Well, I think the art lies in project selection. You see, we’re working on the re-write of an existing application, which means the team can always use the existing application as a reference.
I’ve learned a lot about how to make offshore projects work over the last couple of years. Here’s a summary…
- Select the right projects to be off-shored.
- Plan to rotate key staff in both directions.
- Invest in collaboration tools (IM, Video Conferencing…)
- Bring the offshore leads on-site for inception.
- Have 2 stand-ups a day (One local. One with the remote team).
One of the key things that I’m learning, and my Lean experience is helping me deal with, is the fact that your buffers need to change in an offshore model. When the team is co-located it’s possible to let the stories get to very low levels as the ability to communicate quickly can always get you moving again. This is harder in an offshore model so we have to give the minimum and maximum levels of stories in each column more thought. We’re currently below our minimum and the developers are traveling so quickly we can’t get back to the right side of comfortable; we’d really like to have a dozen more stories analysed in the backlog to be in our sweet spot.
I have to say that the cost model is compelling. I’m actually for the first time quite worried about the future of on-shore development….