The Failure of the Off-shore Experiment: A Case for Collocated Agile Teams

Abstract

Over the past few years distributed and offshore teams have been held up as the most cost effective delivery model for IT projects of all types. Yet case studies do not support these assumptions. The authors had the opportunity to compare the productivity, quality and performance of collocated agile teams with distributed agile teams and found that the collocated teams perform substantially better. In the first case a collocated team was eight times more productive, while in the second case, transferring the work to a collocated team saved the project from certain disaster. From these examples and others, there are strong indications that companies should be rediscovering collocated project teams as the old/new paradigm for delivering real value for their IT projects.