I was pleased to receive a review copy of Jonathan Smart’s (Better Value) Sooner Safer Happier - #BVSSH, as it was on my list after the DevOps virtual conference this October.
I am uncertain why “Better Value” is not part of the title, because the mantra throughout the book is that it is a guide to creating business agility in a way that is providing Better Value Sooner Safer Happier (BVSSH). I think it is intentional that there is no punctuation in BVSSH because one can read it multiple ways. BVSSH definition: Better is about quality (built-in, not inspected later); Value is the reason you are in business (financial, safety, environment); Sooner is time to market - the whole value chain, filling a warehouse faster doesn’t help; Safer is about risk and governance and compliance, about how customers trust the organization; and Happier is about how people inside and out see and feel about the work. I really like how the authors talk about these elements as being all connected - you cannot force one of these outcomes without putting the others at risk. And these are all outcomes of the way of working, rather than things that you “do.”
The biggest element that jumped out to me the idea of ways of working - the behaviors (and patterns behind those behaviors) that we see in organizations. The main focus of the book is in describing the patterns and antipatterns that reinforce (or damage) business agility, all with a mind to creating more and more of the BVSSH results. Smart and his co-authors made it exceedingly clear that this book isn’t about “implementing agile,” which I appreciated. It is about creating the environment in which people and the organization can operate with agility. While this book is written primarily from a software and IT perspective, many of the patterns have nothing to do with software development per se.
Most of the patterns have to do with the thinking and mindset behind the behaviors and results that we see. Force a “transformation” and you get accused of flavor of the month. Start with the why and you get the potential for longer-lasting and ongoing improvement. The chapters are all written around a variety of connected topics and discuss the antipatterns and patterns. The final chapter discusses a possible “pattern” of how to go about bringing agility into an organization. While I’d love to spend time highlighting all of them, maybe it would be better to go out and get the book. Here are a few items I highlighted (of the MANY):
I liked the reinforcing of how it is possible to get to “Sooner” while also learning and improving. So much time in a typical value chain from idea through delivery is spent waiting in queues: waiting for approval; waiting for experts; waiting for review; waiting for rework; waiting on the next step in the chain; waiting for a slot to do X; etc etc etc. Understanding the value chain together is enlightening all by itself, but then seeking to remove the queues and enable the work to flow smoothly creates all sorts of new opportunities.
There is an interesting effect (one of the antipatterns) in many organizations that want to repeat what others have done or do “transformations.” When in reality the specifics of every organization are unique. Trying to do what even similar organizations have done without understanding the context and the thinking is sure to create major push-back. A number of the patterns described here have to do with stepping away from the cargo cult and doing what makes sense for your organization. I love the mantra of “Think big, start small, learn fast.”
Psychological safety shows up a number of times in the book as an important means to enable agility - if people don’t feel safe to fail, it is unlikely they will want to try many of these other patterns. In fact, some of the patterns around learning will look like big red lights in unsafe environments. And this kind of environment is probably reinforced by other anti-patterns like command-and-control and measures that become metrics. This safety topic is something I am seeing more and more as being an underlying barrier to flow.
In the end, one of the big takeaways is that the culture we have is exactly the culture we create by the way we decide to work and operate. Our ways of working are our decision. Changing those ways of working are our decision as well.
A minor negative in the reading of the book, is that the authors often refer to other parts of the book by simply referencing “antipattern 5.2” or “pattern 8.3” without naming them. It reminds me of an old joke that goes around where the old friends tell each other jokes by just referencing the #52 or #29 and then laughing away, as everyone knows the context. Either you have to remember from context, or flip to that section and then try to find your place again (see below).
I must note a major drawback on this book: Reading via the publisher’s (IT Rev) e-reader application was a terrible experience. Many of the features just didn’t work correctly, which was very frustrating. This has made my usual reading process a bit more cumbersome as a result. Go out and buy it, but get the physical book or use a more well-established e-reader.