5. Keeping Sites in Touch

We agree only with one another if we sense some commonality amongst ourselves.

—Jean de la Bruyère

The greater the physical distance between sites and the more sites involved on a project, the more difficult and expensive it is to keep the sites connected and the less likely it is that the project can succeed. Some experts recommend that distributed projects never spread over more than three sites, maintaining that anything larger will be almost impossible to synchronize. Carmel and Tjia advocate, “Reduce the number of project locations as much as possible.”1

1 E. Carmel and P. Tjia, Offshoring Information Technology: Sourcing and Outsourcing to a Global Workforce (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2005), ...

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