Otherwise the process of evolving a project alongside an offshore team becomes near impossible, and early critical trade offs stress them so much at early stages that they lose drive, and consequently we lose quality when their commitment, passion, work, and energy generally, start to slip.

Currently working on a big project full time, and your article has been very re-assuring. I am taking full responsibility for I.A., Strategy and Design, and progress has been faster than ever as we prototype without too many cooks spoiling the broth… Again, Giga Om rocks. Cheers Matt. I hope the following book helps many others as it as helped us:

http://www.communicatingdesign.com/

Thanks for the feedback. I did answer some of the questions a few days ago but for some reason the comments didn’t appear. Anyway.

Nabil – the further the geographical distance between you and your developers the more important it is to ensure that you’ve got excellent documentation. We’ve out-sourced to India and had a really good experience, this is entirely down to how we ran the vendor selection process (to ensure that we got good guys) and providing quality documentation.

That said, there’s no alternative to actually visiting your developers regularly throughout the development. Face to face can never be replaced.