Unlocking Continuous Improvement with Better Value Sooner Safer Happier (BVSSH)

Introduction

In today's fast-paced business world, achieving success requires more than just completing projects on time. It’s about delivering high-quality results, maximizing value, ensuring compliance, and keeping both employees and customers happy. The Better Value Sooner Safer Happier (BVSSH) framework offers a powerful approach to achieving these goals. In this article, we'll explore how BVSSH can help your organization continuously improve and thrive in a rapidly changing environment.

Key Takeaways:

• Understand the BVSSH framework and how it integrates quality, value, speed, safety, and happiness.
• Learn how to apply BVSSH principles to drive continuous improvement in your organization.
• Discover how to empower teams and create a culture of continuous learning and adaptation.

Section 1: What is BVSSH?

BVSSH stands for Better Value Sooner Safer Happier. It's a framework that focuses on delivering quality work (Better), maximizing organizational value (Value), reducing time to market (Sooner), ensuring compliance and security (Safer), and fostering employee and customer satisfaction (Happier).

Point to ponder: Have you faced challenges in balancing quality, speed, and safety in your projects? How did you manage them?

Section 2: Better – Focusing on Quality

Quality isn't just about catching defects at the end of a project—it's about building quality into every step of the process. By focusing on quality from the beginning, organizations can reduce incidents, minimize outages, and spend more time being proactive.

Key Metrics for Quality:

• Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF): Tracks the average time between system failures.
• Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR): Measures how quickly issues are resolved.

Section 3: Value – Delivering What Matters

Value is unique to each organization. It could be financial, related to public safety, or even charitable. The key is to define what value means for your organization and to articulate it through outcome hypotheses, which are educated guesses on what actions will yield the best results.

Leading vs. Lagging Measures:

• Leading Measures: Early indicators that provide quick feedback, allowing for agile adjustments.
• Lagging Measures: Traditional metrics that show the final impact of efforts.

Point to ponder: How does your organization define value? What leading measures do you use to gauge success?

Section 4: Sooner – Reducing Time to Market

In today's market, speed is critical. The sooner you can deliver value to your customers, the better. BVSSH emphasizes reducing lead time, increasing throughput, and improving flow efficiency to get products to market faster.

Key Metrics for Speed:

• Lead Time: The total time from starting work to delivering to the customer.
• Throughput: The number of deliverables completed in a specific time period.
• Flow Efficiency: The percentage of time work is actively being progressed.

Poll for you: What is the biggest bottleneck in your organization's workflow?

• Lead Time
• Throughput
• Flow Efficiency
• Other (Please comment)

Write your choice in comments

Section 5: Safer – Ensuring Compliance and Security

In a world where regulations and security concerns are ever-present, maintaining compliance without sacrificing agility is crucial. BVSSH helps organizations strike a balance between speed and safety by integrating governance, risk management, and compliance into the workflow.

Point to ponder: How does your organization balance speed and compliance? What challenges have you faced?

Section 6: Happier – Improving Employee and Customer Satisfaction

Success isn't just about meeting deadlines—it's about ensuring that your team and your customers are happy. A happier workforce is more engaged, productive, and loyal, while satisfied customers are more likely to advocate for your brand.

Key Areas to Focus On:

• Employee Engagement: Create an environment where employees feel valued and motivated.
• Customer Advocacy: Measure customer satisfaction through metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Point to ponder: What initiatives has your organization implemented to improve employee and customer satisfaction?

Section 7: The Virtuous Cycle of BVSSH

The elements of BVSSH—Better, Value, Sooner, Safer, Happier—are interconnected. Improving one area often leads to improvements in others. For example, higher quality leads to faster delivery, which in turn results in happier customers and employees. This creates a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement.

Interactive Exercise: Reflect on a recent project. Which areas of BVSSH did you excel in? Which areas could be improved?

Conclusion: Empowering Continuous Improvement

The BVSSH framework is not about enforcing a one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, it’s about empowering your teams to continuously improve, using the right tools and methodologies for your unique context. By fostering a culture of continuous learning and adaptation, your organization can thrive in the fast-paced digital age.

Call to Action: Join the conversation! How do you plan to implement BVSSH in your organization? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below.