The Agile Manifesto asks for face-to-face communication, trust and close collaboration. But widely accepted wisdom is that trust needs touch. So how can you create this proximity over a distance? You can bridge the distance using virtual communication channels wisely and by travelling – at least from time to time. Yet, even with these answers at hand it is important to make the travel beneficial and to know which virtual communication tools are helpful for what kinds of situation. Another challenge global teams are facing, is overcoming cultural differences. Yet, these differences have their origin not only in geography and language, but also in strategies, politics, values and history. A company, no less than the broader society, shapes a culture that influences its employees’ behavior. A distributed team needs to leverage this and jointly develop a project culture and keep the project history alive for emphasizing the common culture. In this session, Jutta will share her experiences in overcoming distances in distributed projects. Her experiences are mainly based on large global agile projects developing embedded or commercial software.
