Elizabeth Woodward: Face-to-face communication is biggest challenge with distributed Scrum

Distributed agile has been a particular interest of mine for several months.  I’ve managed distributed teams and have long been a proponent of finding ways to address the challenges that remote teams face.  When I heard that a new book was out, “A Practical Guide to Distributed Scrum,” I couldn’t wait to read it.

I had the opportunity to meet and speak with one of the authors, IBM’s Elizabeth Woodward, at Agile 2010. I could have spoken with Woodward all day. In fact, I picked her brain for an hour and a half, way past our scheduled 30-minute interview.  I will be following up a full feature story on the topic of distributed agile, but for now, I will tell you that Woodward confirmed what I’ve been hearing repeatedly: The biggest challenge with distributed agile is the lack of face-to-face communication.