Quality Software Project Management

Appendix E. Distance Project Management

All of the tools, techniques, and methods presented in this practitioner's handbook are applicable to managing distant projects. This appendix will look specifically at managing projects with dispersed teams. Project teams do not have to be many time zones away from each other; they can be in different buildings in the same campus. The critical piece of dispersed projects is communication. Perhaps most famous was the study by T.J. Allen, who demonstrated that the probability of two people communicating in an organization is a decreasing hyperbolic function of the separation distance.^[1] It rapidly decreases to where at 12 meters the chance for a once a week communication is only 5 percent. Figure E-1 shows ...