Doing Agile with offshore resources is an important topic to many software professionals. To succeed with Agile using offshore resources, you have to understand two principles:

• The process of doing Agile with offshore resources is highly dependent on the geography of the country where you do the development as well as where the resources are located.
• It may involve drilling.

Now let’s use several countries as examples to illustrate these principles.

Canada

Canada is a country with very a large land area as well as a very long coastline. It is very rich in both onshore and offshore resources. We’ve got massive hydroelectric resources at Niagara Falls, in B.C. and Quebec, various metal ores in Northern Ontario, potash in Saskatchewan, and, to the scorn of all non-Albertans, oil sands in Alberta. Doing Agile with these resources is conceptually simple: you have to produce the resource, sell it to a customer, that is exchange it for money, use the money to hire people, and let the people do the work. However some businesses have already got money to hire people, so they can skip the first two steps.

Given the abundance of onshore Agile resources in Canada, there is absolutely no need to drill for them offshore in the pristine waters covering our vast continental shelf. You can do Agile without drilling here. Thus, Canadians’ answer to how to do Agile with offshore resources is: don’t.

Denmark

Denmark is Canada’s neighbour. Believe it or not, the two countries share a land border after they carved up Hans Island. Actually, it is a small European country perfectly located to harness wind energy. The wind turbines can be located both on land and offshore and many of the wind farms are actually located offshore as you can see in the picture.

This Agile resourcing strategy is uniquely suited to the country’s geography.

But being a small country, Denmark lacks other kinds of resources, so this strategy may reach its limits someday. However, one of Denmark’s possessions is Greenland, which has huge gas deposits under its continental shelf. Using that kind of offshore resource to do Agile would involve drilling. Canadians’ advice to its neighbours on how to do Agile software development with offshore resources in Greenland is: don’t.

Switzerland

Our last example is Switzerland. How do you do Agile software development with offshore resources in Switzerland? Sorry, but this is a stupid question, because Switzerland is a landlocked country.