Some fine points. I agree about the quality of the people and the passion, but I disagree that distributed teams only work for routine work. I worked on a lar

Some fine points. I agree about the quality of the people and the passion, but I disagree that distributed teams only work for routine work. I worked on a large, complex project wherein we re-built a company's internals from scratch. The details are moot, but the point is we executed like a startup -- we had protection from management, and it worked well. There were bumps in the road, but we continually evolved the process (yes, we did agile) to make the team more and more effective every iteration. Standup was done via phone every day adjusted to meet time zones. Pair programming was done with VNC when we needed it -- mostly used to mentor / bring on new employees who need hand-holding. We did not use index cards to map objects. We did do the following things at a one-week-long co-location: 1-2 days of planning and 2-3 days of whiteboard/design. Iterations were typically 2-3 weeks long after that. I've used this same model at the last couple of contracts I've done and it can work very well if done right (e.g. right people, right tools, right process, right mgmt).