Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility

"This is one of the most important Agile books since The Phoenix Project."

―Charles Betz, author, instructor, and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research

Drive real change through actual business outcomes, not rigid practices and a handful of buzzwords.

Being Agile isn't the goal; the true goal is successful outcomes. And successful outcomes come from embracing business principles that engender high-performing organizations, not from following a formula.

The award-winning Sooner Safer Happier lays the foundation for achieving what truly matters: delivering better value sooner, safer, and happier. Every chapter of this practical guide to business success clearly articulates the typical ways of working that organizations get wrong (antipatterns) and quickly follows them with what to do right (patterns). Each pattern helps empower teams and leaders and allows the organization as a whole to break free of prescribed Agile practices to achieve true agility and success.

Anyone looking to drive successful business outcomes needs this book on their desk to dip into over and over again.

“This is a realistic approach to adopting (or not adopting) agile in your organization. The theory is sound; the practice is extensive. I strongly recommend this book.”

―Dave Snowden, Chief Scientific Officer, Cognitive Edge, Creator of Cynefin

“Sooner Safer Happier is a must-read for any business leader looking to succeed in the digital age.”

―David Silverman, co-author of Team of Teams

Jonathan Smart has been leading an agile approach to change as a business technologist for nearly thirty years, starting out as a developer on the trading floor in investment banking. Today, Smart leads Deloitte's Business Agility practice, helping organizations deliver better value sooner, safer, and happier through the application of agile, lean, and DevOps principles and practices organization wide. Previously Smart led Ways of Working globally for Barclays Bank where after 4 years, teams were delivering, on average, three times as much in a third of the time, with twenty times fewer production incidents and the highest ever employee engagement scores. He and his team won the Best Internal Agile Team award at the Agile Awards in 2016. Smart is also the founder of the Enterprise Agility Leaders Network, a member of the Programming Committee for the DevOps Enterprise Summit, a member of the Business Agility Institute Advisory Council, a guest speaker at London Business School, and speaks at numerous conferences a year.

Myles Ogilvie has led, supported, and coached change initiatives within large and small enterprises for over twenty-five years. An advocate of no-nonsense problem-solving, he seeks to build transparency, improve collaboration, and enable outcomes that produce Better Value Sooner Safer Happier During 2016, when leading ways of working for a major UK investment bank during a period of intense regulatory and controls scrutiny, Myles applied lean and agile principles to risk management in the product development process. He is now a passionate advocate of patterns that can help foster a safer, leaner, and more innovative controls culture.

Zsolt Berend is a business agility practitioner, coach, and trainer. He helps global organizations on their journey to achieving Better Value Sooner Safer Happier. He began his early career as a research fellow in astronomy, and then spent twenty years across industry sectors in various roles applying agile and lean practices, mainly in telecom, healthcare, financial services, and consulting. He was the global chair of the Agile Community of Practice at Barclays with more than 2,500 members, and with the Ways of Working Center of Enablement team, won “Best Internal Agile Team” at the Agile Awards 2016. He writes on Medium and is a speaker at conferences and meetups. His passion is data, measurements, insights, and the creation of learning organizations.

Simon Rohrer has been a hands on practitioner across both software engineering and enterprise architecture for over twenty-six years, and has had a passion for agile software development since picking up the eXtreme Programming white book in 1999. He's passionate about an eclectic and pragmatic approach to modern ways of working, incorporating lean, agile, systems thinking, DevOps and other principles and practices at the right pace and in a human context in enterprises, typically with a legacy of existing technology and a drive to do things better.