Nothing beats in-person communication

Tools like Flock, GitHub, and Trello have made remote work much easier over the years, and we work remotely every day within CodeCarrot across offices.

Remote consulting work is possible, but raises the degree of difficulty. One of the few requirements of Extreme Programming is that the customer is always available (opens new window).

Ideally, that means face-to-face, on-site. We've set up our offices so that our clients work at the same cluster of desks as our teams. Nothing beats in-person communication.

An ideal consulting project for us is one where a member of the client team is willing to work at our office Monday-Friday for the duration of the project. Failing that, we want to find out during the sales process how available they will be on Flock, GitHub, and Trello.

If it seems like they won't be available very often, we should seriously consider declining the project.