Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility

by Jonathan Smart

Better Value Sooner Safer Happier measures include: Better: Better is quality. Depending on your context, quality measures could include system outages, time to recovery, straight-through-processing exceptions, error rates, reconciliation breaks, rework, and so on. Value: Value is unique to your business and is measured via OKRs, specifically the KRs, which are leading and lagging value measures. This could include revenue, market share, profit margin, site visits, new customer attraction, customer retention, trading volume, diversity, and more. Sooner: Sooner is time to market. It’s lead time from starting work on an item of value to getting it into the hands of a customer. It’s throughput, which is the number of items of value over a given time period (which goes up as lead time comes down), and it’s flow efficiency, which is a measure of the percentage of time that work is waiting. This is one of the most important things to focus on. Look where the work isn’t. Alleviating impediments to flow enables lead time to reduce and throughput to rise. It increases “value-tivity”—the highest value in the shortest time.