Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility

"This is one of the most important Agile books since The Phoenix Project." ―Charles Betz, Principle Analyst, Forrester Research

Winner of the Bronze Medal in Leadership from the Axiom Business Book Awards.

It's no secret that we are living in the Digital Age. Technology companies make up seven of the world's ten largest firms by market capitalization. And the key to their success is the key to all modern organizations.

Jonathan Smart, business agility practitioner, thought leader, and coach, reveals the patterns and antipatterns that will help organizations from every industry deliver better value sooner, safer, and happier through high levels of engagement, inclusion, and empowerment. Through his decades of experience in the technology world, Smart provides business leaders with a blueprint for creating a world-class organization of the future.

Through Agile and Lean ways of working, business leaders can empower teams to improve production, grow together, and create better services for their customers. These better ways of working have overflowed from the IT department to every corner of successful organizations, taking root in every industry from aerospace to accounting, insurance to shipping.

This book is not about software development. It is not a book about the computer industry. This book is about applying agility across the entire organization. It's a book that will put you at the front of change and ahead of the competition.

"A true business-wide perspective on Digital Transformation and the need for whole business agility." ―Adam Banks, Non Executive Director and Former CTIO of AP Moller Maersk

About the Author

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 lead Ways of Working globally for Barclays Bank where his teams, on average, delivered three times as much in a third of the time, with 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.

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 astrophysics, 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.

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.