Telecommuting is generally viewed as A Good Thing. However as projects get more complicated and involve more parties who may be geographically dispersed then keeping track of who is doing what becomes harder.
In the past, fiennes.org has worked over email and we have encouraged people to have a todo folder and a completed folder and emails gradually move from one to the other as individual tasks get completed. However on a large project there can be many thousands of emails and it can be a bit of shock when you find out that your view of what still remains to be done doesn't match up with other parties in the project.
Fortunately help is at hand and fiennes.org now utilises redmine for all projects (unless the client has their own issue management software that must be utilised). This gives us a list of open issues with records as to who said what about the issue and who the issue is currently assigned to. This gives a clear overview of the state of the project at any time and a non-ambiguous list of what tasks are currently your responsibility.
We continue to use redmine for the full lifecycle of the project so if any issues arise in the future after the project has been launched then we still have access to the full discussions from parties that led to any of the decisions which means that returning to a project that has been dormant for some time is considerably easier and all parties can get up to speed faster.