by Ross Niemi, Project Manager, ThoughtWorks.

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When I was asked to manage a team on a distributed project, I thought that it would be exciting and was up for the challenge. I had worked on other Agile distributed projects in the past so I was well aware of the pros and cons between co-located and distributed teams.

Globally Distributed Projects have unique collaboration challenges.

As with any software delivery project there are roughly three groups participating: the customer , the developers , and the medium that intermixes between the two. You may be thinking, "OK Ross, you've just described an oversimplification of every project out there. Why does this matter?" Well, try picturing all three groups in three different geographies and time zones. Here are some of the questions I first had for myself that you may be asking now:

Since the project had a tight budget, we did not have the luxury to have me fly around the world to visit every location and talk to people. We needed a solution that works and can be done inexpensively.

As with many Agile practitioners, I love card walls . I can look up from my desk and see what has not been done, what is being worked on, what is being reviewed, and what is approved. Having and managing card walls in three different geographies is truly impractical and looking at a line-by-line spreadsheet doesn't really give a good feel of story progression. In Mingle, by placing the story list in grid view, you can add swim lanes by grouping, and sort stories by color.

Here is what I do:

Card walls in Mingle enable the team to stay on the same page.

Although we are using XP nomenclature on our project, Mingle can be easily configured to be used on other projects such as Scrum , Lean ... or whatever . If you thrive on spreadsheet layouts, no need to worry: You can simply change the view from "grid" to "list". For the true spreadsheet die-hards, you can even export and import the project cards to and from Excel.

On previous Agile projects, I have found that having large burn-up charts gives me and my teammates the motivation to keep on pushing forward to meet the project's iteration and release goals. With Mingle you can have a "Dashboard" which can show your burn up by iteration, velocity statistics, process completeness , etc.

Burn-up charts in Mingle.

These are just some of the reports our team uses to make sure we are on track. The best part is that you are not limited to just these three! The Dashboard is completely configurable and when you use Mingle's simplified SQL implementation (MQL), any property that you have on a Story, Issue, or Bug is fair game to be reported on and monitored.

Customizable Metrics.

Since Mingle has a built-in wiki , our team uses Mingle as a document management tool too. Any electronic document we have, we add and maintain in Mingle. If we have a hard copy, we'll quickly scan it and put it up on Mingle. Mingle has become our one-stop, go-to place for referencing project artifacts and documentation. No need to overnight a document to your other teammate that is 13 hours ahead of you: Just tell them to "look it up on Mingle". The best part? Mingle versions all wiki and card content, including attachments.

Since everything I need to know about the project is on Mingle, I have even ditched PowerPoint and Word to use Mingle for our Iteration Planning Meetings (IPMs) and to manage status reports . By doing this, I have the most current project metrics available and I forgo the tedious duplication process that one typically endures as they go between different electronic file formats. When we have our conference call for team Retrospectives, the team will be viewing the same page as I am on Mingle and they can see my updates when they do a browser refresh.

In conclusion, the groups involved in this distributed project have found that Mingle has been a valuable and indispensable tool. By using Mingle, we have been able to manage our cards, track and report project progress, manage documents, and communicate across multiple locations more efficiently than using traditional methods . In the future, whether I'm working on a distributed or co-located project, Mingle will be the first tool that I would install and use.

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