40 things all working together

A friend of mine is a high school inner city principal.  Inner city meaning Newark, NJ, a pretty tough area.

We were discussing what works at his school, and I asked him whether uniforms had an effect, given the studies that showed that they didn't.  He replied, "Uniforms by themselves don't do anything, but as part of the overall picture, they're vital.  They're one of 40 things that you have to do right.  Working together, they make all the difference."

That reminded me of Agile practices.  I've known several teams where a decision was made to hold a daily scrum.  Didn't do a lot.  People grumbled about the pointlessness and hype.

Like many big institutions, my bank is not Agile, and so I introduced pieces of it slowly.  I found weak to no benefit until I had a decent list in place:

* daily scrum
* strictly focused discussion during scrum
* burndown charts
* self-organized teams of 3 to 4 developers
* 2- to 3-week sprints
* automated daily builds and at check-in
* product backlog
* iteration planning with the product manager
* team iteration reviews
* product demos with the product manager and users
* decision to have release or another sprint after each iteration
* cross-functional skills

Once I had these things in place, I really noticed clear improvement.

But if you had added any one or two of them to our previous team and structure, no, it wouldn't have made any difference.