About Us | Sooner Safer Happier (2024)

Our passion is to enable organisations to achieve better outcomes and a more humane world of work

Our Values

Empathy

This means that we are positive, grateful and kind. We are helpful and constructive. We are not argumentative and negative.

Credible

This means that you can expect premium quality and standards. We are unexpected as we tell it like it is and use humour to have fun. We are not cookie cutter.

Unique

This means that we are practitioners who are consultants and consultants who are practitioners. Like you, we learn by doing. We are not binary in our thinking or approach.

Community

This means that we are passionate about what we do. We love to share stories of patterns and anti-patterns. We do not use jargon.

Our Story

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 capitalisation. And the key to their success is the key to all modern organisations.

Jonathan Smart and Myles Ogilvie, co-founders of Sooner Safer Happier, realised that there was a better way to support business leaders across industry. Motivated by their hands-on experience changing ways of working at scale and the launch of the book, they established SSH as a global consultancy providing training and coaching services and building community.

This is not about software development. It is not about the computer industry. This is about applying agility across an entire organisation. It is about putting you at the front of change and ahead of the competition.

And we can’t wait for what’s coming next.

Who we are

We are a global network of deeply experienced practitioners – experts and thought leaders in the field of business agility with shared values and beliefs. We observe that improving ways of working implies cultural change (i.e. values and beliefs) and that side by side coaching is as key to success as consulting on organisational and process change. We are coaches and we are consultants.

Applying the principle of continuous learning from across industries we describe patterns and anti-patterns for business agility and enable sharing of these through our book, blog and free to attend community events – alongside premium coaching, consulting and training services.

As a business we pursue a cross-sector, cross-border, multi-generational impact. We drink our own champagne and measure progress based on case studies of improved BVSSH outcomes that have been created and shared.

We are committed to social and environmental improvement and operate a tree planting programme to offset our carbon footprint by a factor of x10. We actively support social improvement through our work with Treesisters and through direct outreach with charities to help improve their ways of working.

Jonathan Smart

Jon is co-founder and CEO of SSH. Jon is a business agility practitioner, thought leader, and coach. Jon has been an agile and lean practitioner since the early 1990s. Jon helps large organisations deliver better value sooner, safer and happier through better ways of working. He is the lead author of the award winning and bestselling 'Sooner Safer Happier: Patterns and Antipatterns for Business Agility'.

Mark Hills

Mark is a Partner and EMEA region leader. He is a highly capable, outcome focused enterprise agility partner coach and practitioner with over 20 years’ blue-chip experience. Mark thrives on the intellectual and people challenge Ways of Working engagements present and would describe his mindset as ‘player coach’, keen to lead by example.

Anne Gambles

UK & EMEA Community Leader. Anne Gambles is a Senior Manager within the Higher Education sector with over 20 years of project and business management experience. She has managed Library-related IT, research, development and implementation projects in addition to process improvement and service delivery reviews. Anne has a keen interest in ways of working, business agility, continuous improvement and service optimisation.

Dean Latchana

UK & EMEA Community Leader. Dean is a Business Agility Consultant and Agile Coach based in the UK. He is also the editor of The Agilist newsletter, a nonprofit monthly publication for the agile and lean community.

Kim Atherton

Kim, with a background as a Chartered Occupational Psychologist, works as a leadership consultant with senior leaders in more than 40 countries. Kim has deep expertise in leadership assessment, development and training. Kim is also the CEO and founder of Just3Things, OKR software which was developed while she was the Chief People Officer at Ovo Energy.

Marcus Ward

Marcus is an experienced Business Agility Consultant, Coach, Trainer and Facilitator of Lean, Agile and Organisational Change with a passion for enabling organisations of all sizes to achieve high performance through pragmatic use of Agile, Lean and collaborative techniques. Marcus holds over 15 years’ experience across various sectors in Agile/Waterfall Portfolio, Program and Change Management.

Matt Turner

Matt has over 20 years leading IT and business services, coaching and training teams in lean and agile practices, across various industries and sectors. Matt is fascinated by enterprise flow, the psychology of change, and behavioural economics. Accredited BVSSH and Kanban University Trainer. Contributing author of Agile an Unexpected Journey.

Simon Rohrer

Simon has been a hands on practitioner across both software engineering and enterprise architecture for over 26 years and has had a passion for agile software development since picking up the eXtreme Programming white book in 1999. He is passionate about an eclectic and pragmatic approach to modern ways of working, incorporating lean, agile, systems thinking, DevOps and other principles and practices at the right pace and in a human context in enterprises, typically with a legacy of existing technology and a drive to do things better.

Marcus Braszell

Marcus is a Partner and Americas region leader. His extensive experience leading change in large and complex environments spans financial services, retail, travel, government and defence sectors. Marcus has led business agility at National Australia Bank (NAB), WooliesX, Latitude Financial, and Walmart Canada. A pragmatic, forward thinking senior leader with deep c-level engagement experience, Marcus possesses a commercial approach to innovation and a strong drive to foster people-focused and adaptive organisations.

Myles Ogilvie

Myles is co-founder and COO of SSH. As a principal business agility coach and trainer with many years' experience across industries, Myles advocates no-nonsense problem-solving, seeks to build transparency, improve collaboration, and enable outcomes that produce Better Value Sooner Safer Happier. Myles' special interest is patterns that foster a safer, leaner and more innovative controls culture.

BMK Lakshinarayanan

Asia-Pacific Community Leader. BMK Lakshminarayanan is an inspiring and passionate DevOps Advocate and Value Stream Architect promoting DevOps, Lean and Value Stream Management principles & practices. He serves as a New Zealand ambassador for the Cloud-Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), DevOps Institute and Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), and a Board Advisor for the Value Stream Management consortium (VSMC).

Jay Goldstein

Jay has coached, trained, taught, and consulted Fortune 100 companies and innovators alike to bring entrepreneurialism at scale. Using a systematic approach that combines Agile mindsets and Scrum methods, he loves to empower organizations to delight their customers and bring joy to the workplace.

Kristiana Sotirova

Kristiana is the Social Media and Marketing Lead. After graduating with a BA in Marketing, she started her career in Podcast Production, bringing creativity and a new generational understanding to the way communication functions. All of this ties into Kristiana’s passion for the ever-evolving marketing practices and storytelling in all of its forms.

Mark Payne

Mark was part of one of Australia’s most successful whole of organisation enterprise agility transformations for Bankwest. Mark has strong enterprise agile, business architecture and design skills, and the passion to work with stakeholders at all levels from c-suite to team members to co-design Operating Models, Delivery Models and Ways of Work to drive tangible improvement in delivery.

Peter Maddison

Peter is a coach who works within senior leadership to drive lasting change. He has worked across many industries with a focus in financial services where he has helped multiple large banks successfully design and implement DevOps strategies. Peter works closely with teams across organisations, bringing a business agility mindset to bring safety to complex programs like cloud migration and achieving continuous assurance.

See Also

Training | Sooner Safer Happier

Stephen Dowling

Asia-Pacific Community Leader. Stephen is a passionate educator, sense maker, problem solver and simplifier. In Australia (& worldwide) Stephen is considered to be a thought leader in the business transformation space, along with being a leading educator in the areas of unlearning, agile, lean and ‘fit for purpose’ delivery approaches. Stephen has more than 20+ years of experience within the delivery space. Stephen is a regular international speaker at conferences and industry events and his guiding motto is: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” -Albert Einstein.

Maria Muir

Maria is a Partner and Asia-Pacific region leader. Maria is an enterprise agility pioneer and has been working with early adopters in Asia-Pacific since 2010. She is a pragmatic, outcomes-focused, people-first leader with extensive consulting, start-up, and leadership experience. Maria has led and advised transformations at 10+ ASX200 companies across sectors including financial services, telecommunications, retail, and energy & resources.

Amjad Gani

Amjad is a business agility leader with over 15 years experience in enabling organisations achieve better outcomes through improved ways of working. He has coached leaders, management, teams and individuals in firms across various sectors. Amjad is a people's person who is passionate about making the world of work better for all. He is a proud dad of twin girls and enjoys playing badminton regularly.

Chris Hughes

Chris is a business agility leader and coach with over 25 years experience. His experience spans a number of roles and industries and is a key driver in defining business strategy, product development and the transformation of companies in the tech, travel, entertainment and financial industry. Chris is a strong advocate for customer centric approaches to product design, development, marketing and sales.

Kate Mulligan

Kate is an agility practitioner and team outcome lead for SSH. Kate is a natural community enabler, with a passion for creating engaged communities and teams. She has contributed to internal and external agile and DevOps communities by running meetups, awards and conferences. Kate’s personal vision is to build impactful communities that enable us to live more fulfilled lives.

Lisa Popplewell

Lisa has been focused on transforming ways of working for the past 12 years. Lisa brings with her breadth and depth in delivery methodologies and understands trust is foundational to achieve successful, lasting transformation. In her most recent role, Lisa established and led the transition to outcome-based planning and connecting the company's strategy through to product delivery.

Martin Craven-Wickes

Martin has provided pragmatic leadership on improvement of business agility, and introduction of product management, lean portfolio and lean control approaches in the financial services industry for over 15 years. With a deep background in portfolio transformation (PhD level) and scaled agile practices, Martin brings structure and clarity to introduce ways of working improvements and achieve better outcomes. Martin specialises in optimising portfolio outcomes through connecting strategy to execution, introducing smart funding and prioritisation, and establishing minimum viable governance.

Simon Powers

Simon Powers has 25 years’ experience helping leaders of mid and large organisations to thrive in the market and to be better places to work. He works with the board of directors or senior managers to transform the way that they see themselves, each other, and their organisations. Simon founded Adventures with Agile (AWA), a global coaching and training company in 2014.

Zsolt Berend

Zsolt is an agility practitioner coach and trainer. He helps global organisations on their journey to achieving Better Value Sooner Safer Happier. He began his early career as a fellow of research in astronomy, and then spent 20 years across industry sectors in various roles applying agile and lean practices. His passion is data, measurements, insights and the creation of learning organizations.