In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Wes Williams and Mike Stout share their recent experience with a large distributed team, the planning hurdles they encountered and how they passed them, and their recommendation: avoid large distributed teams.
Watch: Planning with a Large Distributed Team (23 min.)
Wes and Mike are practical in this presentation. They talk about a specific experience they had with a small co-located Agile team that grew into a larger distributed team which raised several challenges related mostly to communication and knowledge sharing. They also had a non-Agile relationship with a customer which was not constantly available to provide feedback on the product iteratively developed.
They changed the way they worked with the customer, they also divided the team into multiple smaller teams, they kept stand up meetings across different time zones, tried video conferences, phone conferences and Internet voice chats. Finally, the project was successful, but their recommendation is: avoid large distributed teams when possible.