Inspire, develop, and guide a winning organization.
Create visible workflows to achieve well-architected software.
Understand and use meaningful data to measure success.
Integrate and automate quality, security, and compliance into daily work.
Understand the unique values and behaviors of a successful organization.
Explore our extensive library of experience reports.
An on-demand learning experience from the people who brought you The Phoenix Project, Team Topologies, Accelerate, and more.
Learn how making work visible, value stream management, and flow metrics can affect change in your organization.
Clarify team interactions for fast flow using simple sense-making approaches and tools.
Multiple award-winning CTO, researcher, and bestselling author Gene Kim hosts enterprise technology and business leaders.
In the first part of this two-part episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Dr. Ron Westrum, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University.
In the first episode of Season 2 of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Admiral John Richardson, who served as Chief of Naval Operations for four years.
Weekly discussion around “Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge” with author John Willis.
VIRTUAL — Helping leaders succeed and organizations thrive (formerly DevOps Enterprise Summit).
Venue: Fontainebleau — Helping leaders succeed and organizations thrive (formerly DevOps Enterprise Summit).
DevOps best practices, case studies, organizational change, ways of working, and the latest thinking affecting business and technology leadership.
Is slowify a real word?
Could right fit help talent discover more meaning and satisfaction at work and help companies find lost productivity?
The values and philosophies that frame the processes, procedures, and practices of DevOps.
This post presents the four key metrics to measure software delivery performance.
October 11, 2022
Online Marketing Assistant Lucy here again, to give you my thoughts on Sooner Safer Happier by Jonathan Smart with Zsolt Berend, Myles Ogilvie, and Simon Rohrer. Since its paperback version releases this week, I figured it was a good time to revisit it.
If you followed my summer read-along of A Seat at the Table by Mark Schwartz, you might remember me mentioning Sooner Safer Happier a few times. This was partly because I read Sooner Safer Happier directly before reading A Seat at the Table (so it was fresh of mind), but mainly because both are part of this ongoing conversation that can be summarized as “we did DevOps…now what?”
Sooner Safer Happier is not about methods, although it touches on many of them. Instead, it is focused on outcomes. As the authors say:
The intent is that this book will give you a tailwind for improved ways of working. This book is not just about agile. Or just about lean. It is about ways of working for better outcomes in the Age of Digital.
In other words, Sooner Safer Happier is not instructing you to follow one method; or any specific method at all. The book is entirely focused on helping you structure your company in a way unique to your circumstances, industry, and company culture while focusing on Better Value Sooner Safer Happier.
Well, I suppose we should define that, shouldn’t we?
Sooner Safer Happier is divided into chapters around principles like “Achieve Big Through Small” and “Leadership Will Make It or Break It.” Within each chapter are a series of antipatterns to look out for and patterns to strive for. It is meant to be a handbook for leaders, one which you can open to whatever section seems most relevant to your current needs.
Throughout the book, the authors recommend against big transformations. Instead of trying to “do lean” or “transition to agile,” they encourage you to focus on the outcomes you and your customers want and then organize around the best methods that fit your needs and your existing customer culture. A company can be expertly agile and run very lean but still not be producing products that serve customer needs.
In the words of the authors:
Whatever patterns you choose to adopt, whichever road you choose to take, the destination, which will always be just over the horizon as you are never done improving, should be a place with each of the balanced Better Value Sooner Safer Happier outcomes.
If this book intrigues you, I’d recommend other books that are part of what I think of as 2nd Generation DevOps:
A Seat at the Table: IT Leadership in the Age of Agilityby Mark Schwartz
The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Databy Gene Kim
Investments Unlimited: A Novel About DevOps, Security, Audit Compliance, and Thriving in the Digital Ageby Helen Beal, Bill Bensing, Jason Cox, Michael Edenzon, Dr. Tapabrata “Topo” Pal, Caleb Queern, John Rzeszotarski, Andres Vega, and John Willis
Trusted by technology leaders worldwide. Since publishing The Phoenix Project in 2013, and launching DevOps Enterprise Summit in 2014, we’ve been assembling guidance from industry experts and top practitioners.
In their upcoming book, Unbundling the Enterprise: APIs, Optionality, and the Science of Happy…
Welcome to the final installment of IT Revolution’s series based on the book Investments…
As a business leader, you know that artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer just…
Welcome to the twelfth installment of IT Revolution’s series based on the book Investments…