Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility

by Jonathan Smart

A success pattern is to start with a small Ways of Working Center of Enablement (WoW CoE) with as broad a scope as possible, ideally across the whole organization. The purpose of the WoW CoE is not to inflict the rollout of one set of prescriptive practices. It’s not to saturate the organization with Scrumor to drop everyone into mandated en masse training, or to run an Agile Imposition. The purpose of the WoW CoE is to orchestrate the continual improvement of the system of work and support everyone in the organization to be able to do that on a daily basis, in order to see a positive trend on Better Value Sooner Safer Happier measures; to achieve big through small; to coach at the enterprise level; to run experiments to alleviate organizational constraints that bubble up; and to provide clear minimal viable guardrails, so that it’s agile, not fragile. The WoW CoE supports teams and plays whack-a-mole on new impediments that pop up, which they will, frequently. It ensures that training in many forms is available on demand, shares learning, collates data on multiple outcome measures, generates insights and feedback loops, and makes sure that desired behavior is recognized and rewarded.