For many years I have been involved in distributed software delivery. At the beginning in a waterfall setup. Since 2017 also in agile distributed delivery. I have seen many engagement fail and also have been part of successful delivery setups. Here’s my personal top 20 list of mistakes in that area.

Nr 20: Involve offshore teams too late
Nr. 19:  Forget to plan enough travel cost
Nr. 18: Forget to invest into communication infrastructure
Nr. 17: Neglect the time zone differences or cultural norms when scheduling ceremonies
Nr. 16: In communications, forget to level the playing field
Nr. 15: Teat all offshore location as „Offshore“
Nr. 14: Missing alignment on the delivery model
Nr. 13: Trying to enforce the same working mode for all teams
Nr. 12: Use the one-size-fits-all delivery model
Nr. 11: Go distributed with the wrong engagement
Nr. 10: Assign the wrong work to the offshore team
Nr. 9: Forget to extend the role model setup
Nr. 8: Deny the language differences 
Nr. 8: Not understanding political and cultural differences across the locations
Nr. 6: Forget the relationship building
Nr. 5: No direct access to users and customers
Nr. 4: Forget the business view 
Nr. 3: Forget to create the big picture for offshore teams
Nr. 2: Offshore teams not on eye-to eye level  
Nr. 1: Do it for the wrong reason, i.e. only look at the price