Lessons Learned from Leading Workshops about Geographically Distributed Agile Teams

We´ve been teaching workshops about geographically distributed agile teams together and separately since March 2011. In that time, we´ve led workshops in New Zealand, Australia, Israel, Germany, and multiple times in the US, Saudi Arabia, and Canada. But it doesn´t matter where we hold these workshops or where the project leaders or the company senior managers are located, we hear many of the same stories. The players vary, the context is often different, but underneath it all, we´ve seen a set of common mistakes and success factors. In this article, we bring these common aspects together into a set of lessons learned, with some concrete advice on how to avoid the mistakes and leverage and amplify the successes.