First, we have a strange story to tell here. To check on your wife's— this is the Visit! Britain Digital Customer Experience programme that we're talking about. Hello— can anyone hear me now? We're here today to talk about a little bit of an introduction as to what the programme was all about, a bit of a consideration as to why Drewpool was considered to be a suitable platform for this programme of work with Visit! Britain, Felly, we're going to talk a bit about the approach that we took in such a large project with multiple websites and a huge amount of complexity. A lot of stakeholders and a very big global audience, a very diverse audience. How we went about discovering what should be done from a technical perspective, but also how to meet the user's needs. Then we want to focus really on the key changes that we imparted as part of this programme of work, and then Marie will give a conclusion as to what impact it's had for their organisation. So, I'd like you to meet Marie. Hi, I'm Marie Orpin, and I'm the Head of Digital at Visit Britain. And some of you might know me, I'm Paul Johnson, I'm the Drupal director at CTI Digital and Agency in Manchester in England. So, Visit Britain and Visit England are brand names of the British tourist authority, and we are a non-departmental body funded by the UK government. And the purpose of the organisation is to drive a thriving tourism industry, creating economic prosperity across Britain. And we do that by encouraging overseas visitors to Visit Britain, inspiring people who live in Great Britain to take their holidays there, promoting the provision and improvement of tourist amenities and facilities in Great Britain, and advising ministers and public bodies on tourism matters. We're CTI Digital, so we're one of the largest Drupal agencies in the UK. Beyond Drupal, we have 200 other staff who specialise in strategy, user experience design, content strategy through to performance marketing and conversion rate optimisation. All the way through to, we've got a big photographic studio and video studio in our offices in Manchester, so we truly are a full service agency. And we work across, we in Drupal, we work with a wide range of different clients from higher education such as Manchester Metropolitan University through to a cultural sector with London Transformers Year, all the way through to a private sector with organisations like BSF and the NHS, so we use Drupal in many different ways. So back in 2021, Visit Britain realised that in an ever more digital world, the way that people search for and consume information is constantly changing. And as part of our strategy to grow Britain's visitor economy, we wanted to ensure that we were reaching the right people in the right way and at the right time. And of course, that meant digital. And just like many other well-established organisations, by that time, 2021, Visit Britain had a really fragmented digital estate. It had multiple websites on different platforms. We had Sitecore, Drupal 7, Drupal 8 and WordPress, multiple agencies and these digital properties were being managed by many different teams within the organisation. So of course, there were different ways of working, which was inefficient. It wasn't possible for investments to be shared. And over time, the website's content had become really quite bloated and information was duplicated in some cases across sites. So what that meant for the user was a fragmented, confusing and sometimes broken journey. So we were not giving the users the experience that they wanted and expected and also our website didn't support the organisation's ambitions around digital first. So recognising that significant change was needed, we started the digital customer experience programme and the vision for that was to deliver a new forward looking digital ecosystem supported by the implementation of a single scalable global content management system and digital asset management system, as well as associated new processes and ways of working. So that was the vision. And to bring that vision to life, getting the user experience and the technology right were obviously critical. But we knew that people and processes are just as important and we didn't want to have an in-house team facing off to an agency team. We wanted one team all working together with shared goals and the same passion and ambition to deliver. And like any team, we needed to have clear roles and responsibilities. So we centralised the digital team at Visit Britain and established our role as facilitators, advocates and guardians of the new digital estate and ways of working. So in my team, we provide the systems, support, tools, training and documentation for our digital estate. We advocate for digital best practice and the benefits that brings to teams and the whole organisation and industry. And we're the guardians of Visit Britain's digital standards, ensuring the cohesion of the estate as a whole. And as Marie said, we worked in an embedded way. It was really important. They were looking towards us to provide the strategic direction for this project, which involved the potential retirement of a number of sites. They had impact around ways of working internally at Visit Britain and therefore may have affected people's roles and their jobs. And we also engaged with Visit Britain together hand in hand to produce, to undertake an extensive phase of user research to understand what the audiences were and what they thought the purpose of Visit Britain was fundamentally as well as the websites themselves. And ultimately from this user research and also researching the ways of working internally within the organisation, we started to form a solution architecture that met the user needs and also the organisational needs. And then ultimately planning a technical solution that could be developed and rolled out in a sustainable and consistent way. So a huge amount of work was done in that regard. So at the time of the public procurement for this project, Visit Britain did not dictate that Drupal would be the platform that necessarily would be part of the solution. And CTI Digital does deliver across multiple CMSs. So even at that point, we weren't necessarily thinking that Drupal was going to be absolutely the tool to use. But based on the requirements that were discovered, Drupal was well justified. So Visit Britain operates in a highly regulated environment. They are very committed to security, GDPR, accessibility compliance and particularly content governance. So every website has workflows to go through editorial approval. But over that, ensuring that media has all the necessary licensing and permissions, it's really, really vitally important that Visit Britain shows leadership there. And these all lean towards Drupal's strengths. And they needed to roll out multiple websites from a common code base. They wanted one CMS to rule them all. And it was also serving a global audience. So translation was a very important factor here. But not only translator, but it needs to be localized based on the user research. Different territories find different facets of Visit Britain appealing to them. So we wanted to make sure that we responded to that. And also drawing from the e-commerce functionality within Drupal, we wanted to, the Visit Britain shop needed to be delivered. But there was already an existing integration to Magento, to XGB, which is the ERP system that Visit Britain have generated to link through to theatres, to the underground ticketing systems. Multiple different providers and highly complex. So what we ended up doing was we built a bridge between Drupal and Magento. So when you visit the website, you are interacting with Drupal but via APIs. We're actually having Magento as the commerce engine. So that was important to not introduce wide scope of complexity. And few CMSs can meet these demands. So, as I said, whilst we use multiple CMSs, Drupal was the clear winner. So one of the things that we found really beneficial with our program was that we took the time up front to make the right strategic decisions and really think them through. Because of course those decisions that you make right up front, ladder down through the program. You don't want to be there six months in wasting time while you're discussing something that actually could have been agreed a long time ago. So, for example, that took us to one of our key principles, which was that we would not repeat what others do well. So, you know, as the UK tourist board, we're not in competition with the tourist industry in the UK. So, you know, the principle made sense strategically, but what would it mean in practical terms? Well, what it meant was rather than providing content on UK attractions, we would talk about the UK and we would talk about particular locations, but then we would allow the attractions themselves to talk about themselves because obviously they're going to do a better job of that than us. Which, again, strategically is a really sensible approach, but the concern was what would that do to our search rankings. And we'll talk about that in a bit. So, other strategic decisions we made were around reuse and efficiency. We were restrained in terms of, you know, resource and budget, as I'm sure most clients are. So, we wanted to reuse our components and our content as much as possible to get the best value from them. And we also wanted to offer a vast library of visual assets, which is critical both to us in selling Britain, but also for all of our partners who are also selling Britain around the world. And also for journalists because PR is a huge part of the organisation. So, that led us to the decision that we needed to have a digital asset management system. So, those decisions which determined what we would do and how we'd do it all had to be properly evaluated, understood and most importantly, probably communicated throughout the organisation. So, this programme of work spans four years. We're in year three at the moment and it had multiple phases and involved different stakeholders throughout and also different disciplines from our agency as time passed. And so, what we felt was really important at the start to have a model that could introduce continuity throughout the project so we didn't lose our way and as people were brought on to the project, they had this guide to, like a north star to be able to, for them to understand what the grounding principles of this project were and having these robust guidelines were invaluable. And in setting our digital standard, we took our inspiration from the Government Digital Service, which of course made sense because Visit Britain is a publicly funded organisation, but also because the GDS has developed such an incredible range of really transformative products that are used by 13 million people a week. So they kind of know a thing about digital. There are some differences of course between the GDS and Visit Britain. So for example, most of what the GDS does is transactional services. It's a much more mature organisation digitally than we are with far greater scope and resources. So whilst we took inspiration from what they do, we needed to adapt their standards to work for us. And so these are the 11 standards that we abide by in this project. They were developed in collaboration with colleagues at CTI Digital and also Visit Britain, multiple participants. Everyone was really brought into what we were charting out to do. And whilst you might align to some of these standards, if you were going to do this, I would recommend that you work inside your teams to develop your own, but maybe use these as an inspiration. So we developed guidelines and processes that were shared amongst the team and the wider organisation. And they really were the practical embodiment of those principles. So they included documentation, tools, systems, training and support. So we wrote documentation that captured those core principles and ways of working. We embraced resources and patterns that enabled reuse. We defined and shared technical components. We up-skilled the team and very importantly the wider organisation. And we created standardised ways of working. Because there's no point in having these principles if people don't know they exist. So with 12 sites across the estate serving a really broad range of different audiences and having different purposes in global locations, the challenge at the start was the scale of the task at hand we had to conduct a discovery that gave us enough research to be able to proceed whilst there was a desire to get these new sites released. But there was a risk that we would leave things undiscovered that we would wish we'd have found out earlier. We needed to make sure that we'd found out enough so that the decisions we were making early weren't going to impact what was happening later. And each was intrinsically linked to business workflows. So there was risk that if we missed something out it would hamper Visit Britain's business capabilities. So what we did was we broke out the work into an initial estate-wide discovery so we focused on identifying the commonalities reviewing all the sites at a high level but sufficiently deep that we felt that we understood the sites and what its purpose was in terms of Visit Britain and also the audiences. And we engaged with stakeholders and the user audiences across all sites at a fairly high level. And for each site as we approached them we had specific discoveries for those sites but we were building on top of the functionalities that we discovered and built for the common estate. Of course a huge part of discovery is engaging with stakeholders and at Visit Britain there are a lot of stakeholders because the websites are absolutely business critical. They form for a lot of teams that is the core focus of their work. So it was really important to understand what those websites meant to people, what were the pain points, what would be essential for us to keep and what were people's future ambitions. And with so many people involved that was a really complex process so we needed a consistent approach to gather all of the information in a limited time scale. And we actually took inspiration from Drupal paragraphs here. So we built this modular framework to use similar questions across multiple stakeholders. So we identified the areas and topics, we developed questions around those and then we were able to map those to different stakeholders so they were personalised to that specific stakeholder but what it did was allow us to ask the questions in such a way there was consistency across time which allowed us to analyse them in a more meaningful way. And to understand how the estate served users of the various websites and therefore how it might need to change we undertook a detailed analytical review. And as a joint team we came to the conclusion that the most important thing is that the right audiences can find the websites and the right information on the websites at their time of need and also that when they get there it's easy to use. So what really matters is SEO and user experience. And that was quite liberating for us as a joint team. They were basically agreeing that all the sites that existed presently that might not necessarily be what we were to develop in the future. So I'm just going to highlight a few of the techniques that we used during this discovery. Most people are probably familiar with tree testing but what we did here was and is illustrated in this diagram that these nodes are actually we did an estate-wide tree test so we gave people tasks and at the top of the tree was the websites themselves. So we were looking to try and discover whether or not people were going to the right website in the first place and as you can see in certain situations they went down the wrong path. So what people thought the website was for wasn't actually what it was actually doing. So this was a really, really valuable foundational work about informing us what did end users really think the websites were for. We also used analytics and data to model the estate. So this diagram here, each node is a website and the lines are the traffic between the websites so oftentimes people will be going to multiple websites and find the information they wanted is what's indicating and the proximity is the strength of the linkages the amount of traffic that's passing between the sites and therefore the similarity of the websites which we interpreted as being that there was a potential to maybe merge these websites and even these two here maybe bring them together to have a more simple and harmonised estate. So because the web estate was made up of so many sites all of which had crossover between segments and user needs we wanted to first understand what people actually clicked on before then delving a couple of levels deep to really understand that's how the information architecture was working. So we already had some surveys in place which we augmented to understand who those different segments were, what the top tasks on each site were, whether users achieved their goals, whether their expectations were met and we wanted to understand ideas for improvement and also which competitors they used and what they thought of that and any recommendations and we had about 2,000 responses which was statistically significant. So we began to move towards user experience designs and also proposing different approaches to the information architecture as the navigational structure of the sites with the best will in the world. We didn't actually know which was the best approach and we believed that the best people to answer that question is the actual users. So we used preference testing. So here is an example where we had three different options and we literally asked the user to express a preference as to which one they had an affinity with more or less and the multiple navigation trees. We had design concepts which we asked multiple questions to get a sense of their opinion and obviously a large number of people went through this and it gave us a lot of confidence that we could move forward with a specific which approach was the winner. And with over 15,000 content items across the estate it wasn't practical for us, our content strategists to actually go and look at every single item. So we used content sampling which is where we dip into each website and take a representative sample of the content within that site and then we were assessing it against different criteria. So we were looking at what was that content what audience was that trying to treat what was the purpose of the content and therefore together the purpose of the website what topics did it cover and also from a qualitative perspective making any observations about the type of content and things like the reading level and whether or not it was suited to the personas that it was meant to be treating. So we did this across all sites and we used spreadsheets to try and map similarities or to identify similarities which also led us to further inform the way we might be able to merge sites together. Something that was a real revelation which we came to using just Google Analytics was we identified that 93% of quality visits to our website were spent engaging with just 25% of our content. Another approach that we took was to look at the websites and then we began to understand what the audiences were and again we saw similarities which allowed us to model to a dramatically fewer number of sites. In parallel to contribute to the content governance side of things we undertook our digital asset management discovery. Visit Britain has a long heritage of commissioning and curating large amounts of images about the country so that it can project really impressive visual narrative about the country but the ASIS operating model was quite inefficient it took a long long time it might take three or four months to actually get the permission to use an image and to get the licensing signed off and it also relied on external suppliers to be able to provide this capacity so in many respects Visit Britain were impeded by the ASIS model. We looked at the technology also the servicing layer and also the internal human resources we interviewed staff to see how they use systems to do this and then we discovered that a lot of it was done in Excel or using Google Cloud rather than any kind of rigorous process that was consistent between staff and we also conducted market research once we elicited requirements from stakeholders as to enabling them to do their jobs and we did a short listing exercise where we scored the market proposition and advised Visit Britain in their dam procurement so they went out to public tender which resulted in a supplier being selected and we as developers produced a proof of concept to evidence that this new dam could actually integrate into Drupal in a multi-site environment and they have a really powerful capability now to revoke permission for the use of an asset so they can flag an asset in the dam and that propagates across the whole estate and if it needs to be removed immediately that can happen and an image is replaced so it gracefully removes the image but there are also reports in place that warn people that there is upcoming expiry of an image that they're using so those findings led us to make some key transformational changes so firstly we implemented simple user-centred navigation grounded in customer data so users can filter using the headings destinations, things to do and plan your trip it's really simple and these are the things that people told us in the research that are important to them and that they understand one fundamental change which was triggered by finding in our initial research was that we sort of had this assumption that visitors to Britain and even British people themselves understand British geography and actually that's not true people need to have more help they don't always know where a specific decision at the destination is they don't want to be limited by geography when browsing so our research helped us to identify a simple categorisation that matched the user's mental models which is city, countryside and coast and that was just one of the many changes driven by our initial discovery work so another element that we introduced was a storybook design system so we are responsible for maintaining multiple websites that have different look and feels but there is an overarching storybook which has all of the components within to build a website but because Visit Britain has multiple brands so Visit England, Visit Britain and then there are different audiences as well so trade and media they all have slightly nuanced looks and the storybook is a really fabulous platform to get the visual look and feel up before we start development so that the client can cascade that around the organisation to get sign off but it also means that it is a capability of using it in other platforms as well so it doesn't mean that we have to use Drupal for everything and it's also extensible so in the future we can add new components as well so we realise that the solution to a lot of the issues that we had up front, multiple websites multiple agencies, different ways of working wastage, resulting in a poor customer experience and additional cost was actually having one CMS and having one CMS gives us the capability to build once and then roll out as many times as we want which is just unbelievable really after 20 years of being in digital to have that capability is actually incredible as a marketer and that has enabled us to have one way of working one agency and one set of infrastructure costs so really just having that one CMS was the embodiment of one of those principles that we had at the beginning so focusing the resources on similarities before differences was the key principle here we looked to try and find as many common answers so that we're building as fewer things on each discrete site as possible so encapsulated all the front end all the content types that are common across the site the branding any things like GDPR and SEO functionality all of the good things that Drupal is great at what a good site needs to have is all in this initial capability platform and so what we have now is the capability to be able to install a site and even within minutes we've got a fully working Visit Britain Drupal website with specific capabilities that they have and we built it off the back of the heritage of our agency platform built on Drupal called Voyager so that had already gone through multiple rounds of accessibility testing, penetration testing usability testing so it was bringing forward all of that heritage but we made a specific solution for Visit Britain that met the needs of their organisation so the idea is that we've got Drupal Core then we have the core features of the ICP everything a good website needs but then you have the feature library so things like the dam integration and maybe some sites of a blog and some other events and we've got these ingredients to make sites and recipes basically so the consumer and industry site have different capabilities and requirements so it means that we can make an enhancement in any one of these features and then we can roll it out to multiple sites as well so it's reducing the long term cost of ownership of course all of these things are developed to the Drupal standard so it's open to other agencies contributing to the platform or in heretics in the future so it means that we can contribute back to Drupal any patches or any enhancements that we've made and specifically around the multilingual features we've found some bugs in core which we've pushed back to Drupal.org and there's a ground in principle of any state funded project is that we should be working out in the open and also contributing to open source where possible so one of the things that we've done is we've created lots of paragraph layout components so I'm sure a lot of people in the room will know about paragraphs we just want to point out a few of the ones that we're quite proud of so this is the filterable listing so it's based on solar in the back end what it's capable of doing is presenting multiple types of content and also we can control the filters that we've got here there's one filter here which is national but here it's an events calendar which we launched on Monday and it has two filters that are specific to the needs of an events calendar and in the back end we've got a simple version of views really but editors can't use views, it's too complicated so what we've done is we've given the ability to target different markets so that's where you get the calendar and the other listing on the left this is basically identifying taxonomy terms so we can do different categorisation and then we can say which type of content we want to present and also you can order by different criteria and that can be customised as well so really powerful for a content editor to be able to do that without the need of a developer and the map listing is quite powerful as well but it also responds to the mental model of the user as Marie said most people don't know where places are in England and if you're coming from China you might not know that the Lake District is a really long way from Bath so as I interact here click on the list it's telling me where Bath is and then I'm going up to the Lake District to click in on that and it's telling me where it is it's a simple thing but really really valuable to someone who's planning a trip and it needs to be a feasible trip and also we've created stubs so some of these entities are within the website they're content types but the stubs are just very very small content types so we don't have to put all of the detail in and they just link straight out and that leans towards Marie saying that they're not necessarily the best source of information for any particular topic so technically we're responding to that need as well so obviously the whole organisation is trying to maximise the volume and value of tourism to Britain so a simple way of doing that is to encourage people to stay longer when they're in Britain and experience more of it so the whole website is focused on inspiring and informing visitors so these components are just perfect because they enable us to choose something exciting thing to do in Wales in the autumn beautiful photography from the dam really really sells the experience so here we are in the Midlands in the life of a Peaky Blinder or visiting one of our featured cities so this is incredibly powerful in terms of marketing and in terms of influencing customers and these components that TTI has created for us enable us to be creative and to use our rich visual assets to really sell Britain as a tourist destination and showcase the experiences that Britain offers highlighting our cultural hotspots and helping visitors to plan their trip and it's also about helping people to understand that Britain is not just a seasonal vacation it's actually an all year round place to visit and here's the industry site which was launched on Monday you can see that there are some common artists between the sites but they're completely different purposes so they're using different components and different combinations and it's got different branding on it as well so moving on to the content and governance which was really holding visitor in back in the past we've translated the sites into six languages and it's now localized so you'll see on the left we've got the... that's the Spanish no it's the French and we've also got the Italian highlighting different destinations to go to because the user research has told us that that is the most likely things that a visitor from those countries is going to... will appeal to them and in the back end the translation management is using obviously the multilingual features that Drupal is famously good at so two years ago there was a huge amount of content on the Visit Britain website and it didn't have the resources to optimize at all and I spoke earlier about one of our strategic decisions which was not to repeat what others are doing well so also taking into account that analytics finding about 93% of quality visits to our website spent engaging with just 25% of our content so that led us to the decision to retire 90% of our content which as a marketer is an incredibly brave decision and we knew that there was likely to be an overall reduction in traffic from doing that but actually despite retiring so much content we only saw a 34% reduction in traffic overall in the first month and looking at September's figures for the global English site which is the first one we launched in December although there has been a reduction in overall traffic quality visitors which are the ones we care about have increased enormously from 228,000 per month to 746,000 and to further bolster the reduction in the content across the site and there were many many examples where a topic had been covered multiple times so what we did was we agreed that there would be one canonical source that could be shared to different places, surfaced in different places on the estate so the consumer site is the one that is the source and we can launch that anywhere on the estate using JSON and REST functionality which is built into Drupal and it means that we can re-style it quite quickly as well so we're focusing the effort on producing one single brilliant piece of content So one of the recommendations CTI made to us was given the value of our assets and that we have thousands and thousands of them and the risks associated with asset management in terms of fines etc and reputational damage that actually we should have our own in-house team so we created that team we brought in digital asset management system we wanted it to seamlessly integrate with the website so that only approved assets with the correct rights in place could be used and that in my experience is very rarely done and actually seeing it in action is really a game changer for us so as Paul mentioned if we need to withdraw an image quickly we can do so centrally and we also wanted a much richer library and for it to be an easy to use highly searchable system where both internal and external users can find what they need quickly The keen-eyed amongst you will notice that each one of the images on the website has actually got attribution automatically so that's a time-saving thing, really small but it adds up to a lot of time We can now fast bulk ingress assets into the dam so it's got all of the features you'd expect of a really feature-rich dam so it supports the photographer's workflow and makes it really efficient It's also got approval workflows so we're checking to see whether or not they've got model permission for each one of the people that are in the image building consent so in the UK if you take a photograph at a station or a public building you have to have a written permission to actually use it so the dam stores all of those submissions so it's absolutely watertight We also have an API that warns content editors that they've got images that are approaching rights expiry and it's a really good thing about Drupal is that the dam that we procured didn't have any of these functionalities but we worked together with the dam provider to send it to Drupal to meet the specific requirements that VisitBritain had and yes, we can remove images at a moment's notice The images that you've seen throughout this slide deck and the ones that are on assets.visitbritain.com are an embodiment of the fact that they now have this huge really rich resource to draw upon to sell the country The impact for the new dam has been absolutely incredible so it's currently used by 221 people internally nearly 2,000 external users and that number is growing all the time and that represents over 1,300 different organisations and across 63 countries in the world So really, in conclusion the programme that we launched two years ago and have delivered with CTI has been truly transformative We have transformed our digital presence so that means that we can attract and engage audiences as never before and we can see that in our stats and that has also reinforced our position of authority and leadership in the sector We have a unified technology platform that enables reuse and has significantly reduced the duplication of effort and I guess most importantly now enables us to innovate at pace and we have a consistent digital first way of working across the organisation So we are really proud and I think rightly so of what the joint team has achieved and the results speak for themselves So 24% increase in engagement rate 36% increase in session duration and over 40% increase in quality visits which really is incredible and transformative So yeah, thank you very much I'd like to thank Marie for taking the time to come over to Drupecon to speak today and I'd like to thank everyone here today for coming to listen and does anyone have any questions? Oh God, do I really have to? Okay, did you mention which CMS you used before? I guess you used many because there were many sites and second, how many editors do you have and what has their experience been to move to Drupal? So we had multiple sites we had multiple versions of Drupal and Wordpress before and so now we have editors within the country teams so we have six country teams and within those teams their marketers are not digital first people but they have found it so easy to use that actually they're all using it it's easy for them and the feedback we get is really positive Part of user research that we did was with the actual content managers so we have laid on top of Drupal some enhancements to make their lives easier Yeah, thank you I was wondering what DOM system are you using and are you replacing the entirety of the media library in Drupal with the DOM or part of it? So the DOM system is provided by Look at me Look at me, I always forget and that then is our entire DOM so all of our images are held in there and then just pulled through to Drupal So they specialize in the tourism industry based in Australia what we did was we worked with the provider to get integration to the media module in Drupal so that the assets could be harness using all of the capabilities that Drupal has like resizing of images and having responsive images so they are drawn into the website but there is a knowledge of a linkage retained So my question is why was Magento used or chosen as the commerce part of the site and not using just Drupal commerce which is native? Really good question The answer is Visit Britain have invested in over many years a large platform called TXGB which has all of the availability of theatre tickets and it links to the mayor of London's systems and multiple others there is an existing integration to Magento with that and it took years to develop and we didn't want to remove all of that investment or to create more scope for the project so what we did was and we do develop Magento sites as an agency so it was very much in our wheelhouse but what we wanted to do was to leverage Drupal's fabulous content management capabilities is way better than Magento and we can really paint with the content and with freedom and what we did was we actually integrated the product as a continuous migration of product into Drupal so that we can treat it as a native entity in Drupal but then we have the basket interacting with the basket in Magento so quite an elaborate solution but it was because of this big investment in Magento already so Drupal comments is great Sorry, I just have a question on the governance side of things we're staring down the barrel of a similar public sector project and just in terms of buy-in how are you set up to get that project underway when you have multiple stakeholders turns into design by a committee and then a bun fight and then the timelines blow up and all that so I'm just interested to hear what your experience of that was So full disclosure, I wasn't there at the beginning I've only been here for the last two months hence having to use the notes but what I do know is that they put in place a decision making board with four members of the board on it and that has really helped because that board is still continuing it's quite like touch now because they've seen that the programme has really delivered but basically all key decisions need to go through that board it's held monthly so there's not a big time lag in terms of making decisions And in terms of that authority are they like they put the hammer down and everyone listens to them or do they just fight their corner up there Are they, do they have quite blunt authority to make those decisions? Yeah, okay Yeah, I mean the other thing that we did do was at the very start of the project we engaged with a large number of stakeholders to make sure that their voices were heard and we understood what their needs were and so it was a top down and also a bottom up approach And then the second thing is in the translations did you guys cover Welsh? So we, okay No, it's alright We're from an Irish university so we're trying to figure that out That's not in your, it's a different government I know but it's a similar language we're just seeing what you guys might have used for that Yeah, as an agency we have experience with delivering Welsh language websites perhaps we could speak afterwards I'm glad I got that right then I'm afraid I think we're out of time but if anybody else wants to ask any more questions go ahead, we'll be around for a while


I was going to remaster my album.  Just remaster and you ain't got to worry about all that. But I didn't want to go that approach because you can't remaster Doggy Style, like you can remaster them R&B songs.   You know what I'm saying? You can't recapture that.   Because after seven years, in case you artists don't know, it's a seven year clause where you can remaster your album and get the ownership back.


Hello and welcome to the session. In this session we discuss the final question which says, find the value of sin 30 degrees geometrically. Before we proceed with the solution, let's recall the RHS congruency rule. According to this we have if in two triangles, hypotenuse one side of a triangle are equal to the hypotenuse and one side of the other triangle, then the two triangles are congruent. This is the key idea to be used in this question. Let's move on to the solution now. We need to find the value for sin 30 degrees geometrically for this. First of all we take the triangle ABC be an equilateral triangle. So this is triangle ABC which is an equilateral triangle. We take let the sides AB, BC and CA be equal to 2A. Now since triangle ABC is equilateral triangle, therefore angle A is equal to angle B is equal to angle C is equal to 60 degrees. Now next we draw AD perpendicular to BC. So we have this AD is perpendicular to BC. Next we consider the triangles ABD and ACD. Here we have AB is equal to AC which is equal to 2A since it is an equilateral triangle. Then we have AD is equal to AD which is the common side. Then angle BDA is equal to angle CDA each is equal to 90 degrees since we have AD perpendicular to BC. So therefore we have triangle ABD is congruent to the triangle ACD using the RHS congruence rule stated in the key idea. Now since these two triangles are congruent, this means that BD is equal to CD since these are the corresponding parts of the congruent triangle that is CPCT and each would be equal to 2A upon 2 since BC is equal to 2A. So we get BD is equal to CD is equal to A. Also angle BAD would be equal to angle DAC and each would be equal to the measure of angle A upon 2 which is equal to 60 degrees upon 2 and thus this is equal to 30 degrees since they are the corresponding parts of the congruent triangle so they are equal. Thus we have angle BAD is equal to angle DAC and each is equal to 30 degrees. Now consider the right triangle ABD in this we have sine 30 degrees is equal to perpendicular that is BD upon the hypotenuse which is AB. Now we got BD equal to A. So this is A upon 2A this AA cancels and this is equal to 1 upon 2 thus we get sine 30 degrees is equal to 1 upon 2 thus we get the value for sine 30 degrees as 1 upon 2 geometrically. So this completes the session hope you have understood the solution of this question.


What day is it Monday thrown off? It's like I think I got the right day in the title That's the thing Yo, well happy Monday everyone. Hope your week is going. Well start to it. That is Joe, let me toss a thumbnail on here and hope you guys are all looking forward to tonight's stream Should be a good night.  And remember guys only two days remaining to get your To get your What's it called entries in for that national promo two days remaining? So don't miss your chance today and tomorrow's breaks, and that's it Stack up those entries guys stack up those entries Looking to sell out some pristine baseball here to start out the evening pick your team style pristine You've got seven to go on the first pick your team style. This is break number 38 So I'm gonna drop a link in the chat for you guys Feel free to give it a look there another day. Yes, it is Should be a good one. I like our schedule tonight. You guys can see it right there a really fun ending here with the NT flawless eminence Actually the contenders leading into that as well. We'll actually be quite fun nice full case break of that Yeah, I don't even understand that one yesterday I walked I was walking around and saw that Is that real a shield in the top half? It's like that can't be Six to go now on the first one guys. That's pristine Yeah, I was I was shocked to say the least Man, yeah, that stuff has been great. I'm feeling a Brady tonight So I'm feeling All right, all right, yep, he's dunking on shack if you pull a break. Yeah, I like that. I like that Ah Sean's ready He's got nothing on him. Yeah What's happening cliff Mascot in in the house. That's what we need That's what we need Hey, thanks again everyone seeing a bunch of spots rolling on in here. Let's keep feeling these breaks up that we do have As you can see basketball sold out tonight There are some spots on football and some spots on baseball. I'd like to hear it. Cliff. I'd like to hear it. What'd you get? Please share Open oh the new medicine stuff Nice, oh, yeah, that's you're talking with them. It's not That's pretty crazy from yeah, that's pretty crazy from absolute baseball That's awesome. Jeez That's good stuff You'll certainly take that What do we got left braves? Dodgers Yankees pirates mariners and rays guys Let's fill it up. Let's fill it up Gets better. No way No way, I mean, that's a quad cash auto from 15. Yeah What's going on how you doing That's nice Wow Cliff unreal unreal man Parallel that's what's up. Yeah, good timing on his stuff, man. That's it Nice man Nice teams on the board here guys some nice teams. Let's sell these out Let's sell these out Like I said, don't forget guys only a couple of days remaining if you do want to accumulate those spots for the national promo today and Tomorrow as well That's it and then that is the end of the National promo guys. So like I said, do not miss your chance To keep accumulating some spots in that promo great great promo guys Yeah, should be another great day of breaks guys seeing some spots rolling on in here Let me keep doing some updating five to go five to go. Let's keep filling up the pristine Who else is all the fame all day? Yeah, no doubt. No doubt my favorite player That's active currently that's in the 500 home run club Monster monster hitter Monster hitter. Yeah, that's that's what's up though Cliff Appreciate it. Cliff. You're the man You're the man. I just tossed it out on Twitter as well Went live a couple minutes early as well Let that chat fill on up and get these filled on up Hey, Dan. What's up, man? Are you doing Dan? Good to see you, Dan.  Is that correct? Dan's a YouTube member now. Is this real? This real Dan That's awesome, man What's up? Nice to you. Oh Man, Cliff. Oh man. Oh Man love it. Cliff. We need you. We need you around more often. We need you around more often Not just at Monday at a 3 58 p.m If you hear what I'm saying If you hear what I am saying You ripping met a zoo Pokemon tonight. No Brad is Brad is ripping gaming this evening. I'm on sports all night You can definitely get your orders in on gaming Brad will be ripping all night starting at six Too funny too funny Yeah, that's that's that's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying That is what I am saying Let me get another pristine right after this is one number 38 So if you don't see your favorite team still in this one, be sure you check out number 38 right after guys right after Fixed up a nightbot as well here quick It's like I see some orders coming on in as well Appreciate that. Thank you Go timers Just do this Hey guys, we are over full on personals tonight I will be ripping as many as I possibly can get done following our group breaks this evening Just so you know So appreciate all of the personal support that has been coming on in Thank you guys for that There we go See where we're at guys Five to go now five to go on this first one It's like the pirates went Five to go guys the Braves Dodgers Yankees Mariners and Rays Start out the night here five teams left Let's get this sold guys Clear that Some nice teams on the board here guys. Let's get this sold. Let's get this sold. We got five to go I'll be right back and we'll get this going guys. Thanks again. Appreciate it. All right guys. See where we're at here Bunch more orders came in 37 That looks good Well, we got left guys Braves Yankees Rays Braves Yankees Rays. We got three to go now nice Great progress everyone Braves Yankees Rays Just that three lefts Appreciate that there guys. Thanks Good luck, of course Appreciate you guys joining Be sure you guys are checking out that schedule like I said find your Spots in the national promo is there are just a couple days remaining on it's Find your spots guys. There's always thanks everyone for joining the breaks Appreciate it. Give it a refresh here in just a second. I'm just clearing the email Look at this going like I said guys as soon as it is sold out one to go Who is the one one to go? Just the rays guys just the rays Good stuff. You want to check it out linked in the chat guys just the rays 37 chasing after wander of course Thanks again to see a bunch of spots coming in here across the board on some of these other breaks We got tonight as well down to nine left already on the next one the pristine Five five and now six left Just one to go on that random division style as well later tonight And then also nine and nine here


Okay, good evening everybody and welcome to the Board of Selections meeting for June 18th. We gather this evening to interview a candidate for the job of Comptroller here in Arlington. So I would just like to start out by thanking our screening committee that I honestly feel did an exceptional job despite my leadership on that. Diane Johnson is unable to be with us here tonight but she was part of the screening committee along with Karen Malloy, along with Steve Gilligan, along with Adam Chapter Lane and myself. Andrew Flanagan, our superb deputy town manager is here. He ran an assessment center for us for each of these candidates. So the five member screening committee met and I'd like to start by saying it was originally my goal to bring two candidates before this board, but I'll explain why we're here with one candidate this evening. So we had 19 applicants for this position. Of those 19 applicants, the screening committee we met and we rated and we determined which of those candidates we felt should get an initial interview and to go through the assessment center. Nine candidates were invited to the initial interview and to do the assessment center of which seven was that if I'm remembering correctly. So the seven went through that, they did the assessment center, and from that we determined three finalists. And I believe last Friday, last Friday we, the screening committee, met with the three candidates. And in my opinion, and this is unanimous by the screening committee, I honestly feel one has risen so clearly to the top that I felt I wanted to bring this candidate before the board for each of you to interview and to make your final decision. Before we do that, I'd like to ask any of the members of the screening committee who are with us tonight if they'd like to add anything. First, Adam, anything you'd like to add to our decision? I really, I echo your sentiments, I know myself I was very impressed with the interviews, the presentation and the background and everything that Mr. Viscay brought to the table. I think, I don't know if the board would like to, but maybe hear from Andrew Flanagan about the assessment center if you think that's appropriate. Yep, I was going there after the screening committee members. So, Caron, our director of human resources, anything you'd like to add or thank you. Our excellent treasurer, Mr. Gilligan, sir? Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'd just like to add unintentionally I conducted meetings over the last couple of weeks with other finance officers from, I don't know if they're all women, but certainly in this area of the treasurer, nothing but great praise and good things about Mr. Viscay. Thank you very much. So, one of the things I learned through this process is that one of the things the town does is develops an assessment center. Where each of the candidates are, and Andrew take it from there and explain what the assessment center was and your impressions. Jan, you want to ask something first? I just think, Mr. Chairman, if we could have the microphone for the people. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Correct, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. So, as the Chairman said, we typically run candidates applying for all different positions within the organization through an assessment center style exercise. Generally, they have different components. We test things like basic knowledge that is needed in the position, written ability to communicate through some kind of writing sample, and then an assessment to see how they actually act or operate in something like Microsoft Excel. And they almost every time really provide us with a lot of information about a candidate that doesn't necessarily come out in a typical traditional interview. So, the assessment center that we put together for the controlled candidates had two primary components. One was a basic financial knowledge assessment about municipal finance here in Massachusetts. We provided them with information with regard to the town of Arlington's FY 2015 tax levy. With that information and a little bit of information about the FY 16 levy, we asked them to do a full calculation of what the FY 16 levy would look like. We gave it to them as a piece of paper. I asked them to do this in Microsoft Excel using all the tools contained in Microsoft Excel. To make it of such quality that it could be used in our budget materials. The second piece was more of an accounting exercise where we gave them again limited amount of information, but enough information to ask them to produce a report that would be regularly requested from either myself or the manager from the Comptroller. And then we asked them from the information generated through that report to put together a memo explaining what the town's options were. The payroll exercise meant to basically show us where we are at the end of the year. So in short, all seven candidates participated in the exercise. And Mr. Viscay performed far and away the best on both components of the exercise when compared to the rest of the candidates. So. And Andrew, I had asked you after you, he came in and spoke to us about each candidate and how they had done in the assessment center. And I said, if you were a professor, what grade would you give the candidate? And the only one you gave an A to was? Mr. Viscay? I'll leave it, that's a softball question. Was Mr. Viscay? Adam, coach him more tomorrow.  I forget, but the only A, am I correct? Was Mr. Viscay right? Okay. Yes, question, go ahead. I understand that you have to go with what the protocol is designed for, which is Microsoft Excel, I think, I heard you say. Or Excel. That's what we use for this exercise. I'm just wondering where, this is really a sort of heavy, munis job, what's the similarity between Excel and munis, are you testing something totally different? Like, can you assess, the big thing for a lot of us is knowledge of munis and I did see it in Richard's resume curriculum vitae. But I'm just wondering, is there any sort of compilation or comparison between Excel and munis? There is the most up to date munis. You can export to Excel, a lot of people do that, the current comptroller, the former comptroller, did that on a regular basis. And then you can import back into munis. But a lot of reports we use to make decisions, our accounting system is munis, but Excel has a lot more functionality in terms of actually manipulating data and presenting in a way that is easily interpreted by the people who are making the financial decisions. With regard to munis, we did think a lot about including an assessment component with that. Our concern was there are many different versions of munis out there and different communities are operating on different versions. So it would be very tough depending where the candidates were in terms of where they were currently working and whether or not they had munis. Their interface could look a lot different to one candidate than ours does, based on where we were in terms of updates. So it wouldn't be a completely level playing field. That being said, while I wasn't on the panel, I do think an assessment of munis knowledge is one of the questions that was asked. Absolutely. Can anyone respond? I'm sorry, no, keep going. I'm just curious on either with Andrew or through the chairman or the retail manager, was there any part of the Excel protocol that was able to extrapolate sort of basic working knowledge of munis or what was the questions that were asked to kind of satisfy that? So again, it would be very hard through any candidate's work in Excel to equate that to any kind of knowledge of munis. So in terms of what was asked in the interview. Yeah, so in the first round it was a very direct question about, tells us about your experience using any financial software, what do you use? And if you use munis, we probed a little bit deeper about their experience of munis and whether they currently were working on it, what experience they had with it. In the second round, we dug a little deeper about whether or not they'd implemented any new modules in munis and probed deeper into their familiarity with using the munis system. And just for Richard's edification, I just ask that because that's sort of the backbone of the financial software that we agree to move forward on. And there's been sort of a pro and con between the town and school. I just want to make sure, so we can carry on with that particular edict with using munis and integrating everything else that, which is aware of that. And you all assess that, that that was appropriate for the experience. May Mr. Chairman, my number one priority from the start was making sure that the board could have the chance to look at somebody to a point that was expert in munis. I'm with you that it is absolutely crucial that the incumbent comptroller has to be a munis expert and have that capacity. Thank you, sorry. Mr. Curell. Yeah, thank you, Mr. Curell. I just, in fairness to the candidate, I did note on the curriculum that in Salem, there was some work with munis on the time and attendance automation, if I'm not mistaken. And we're about to call them up. You can ask any questions you'd like, obviously, including that question. Any more for Andrew? Nope, okay, thank you very much. On a test I would have failed, by the way. Thank God I'm not a candidate for comptroller. So here's what I'd like to recommend we do next. I'd like to call up Richard to the microphone, ask him if he'd like to make an opening statement. And then one at a time, ask each of my colleagues what questions you have for Richard, comments, statements, anything that you would like. Then we would ask Richard to step out while we actually see if there's a motion to appoint him and take a vote on that, and then we would bring him back in. Is that process okay with everybody? Okay, Richard. So, welcome. Good evening, Richard Viscay. I appreciate you having me here. I'm very honored to be the one candidate brought forward. I look forward to joining the team and helping in any way I could with keeping the financial structure of the city intact for a very impressive there. And I'm happy to sit here and answer any questions about my experience, my day-to-day operations, what I do currently, or any other questions you have. Thank you very much. So, do you remember we started the interview, Richard, asking each candidate, well, you were alone in the room, obviously, but why do you want to come to Arlington? Well, I came to Arlington because I know it to be a great community, a triple A rated community. It's really run professionally, the town manager, not a pretty stable environment. Been doing this for the last 16 years, started at the Commonwealth inside at the DOI, working with 25 cities and towns throughout the North. Got to appreciate, really, when the community's run well versus when the community's not run so well. And from that, I was able to come over onto the town side and went amass. I started as the first finance director of the town, learned the town form of government pretty well, had the opportunity to go over to the city of Salem and work with a city council and a mayor. And again, seven years later, I had another opportunity to go to Everett in the midst of the game and license fight. I thought that was going to be a pretty exciting opportunity. It certainly was an exciting opportunity. We were able to obtain the license and thought that was a pretty great feat. And now I'm just looking for the new challenge. I know that Rublews that was working there for so many years retired and did a little research on the community. It just seemed like a perfect fit for me. And like I said in the interview, it's probably the first job I applied for in 10 years. Most of them I was actually recruited to come to. So just goes to show you how much I thought it would be a great opportunity. Thank you. And didn't you say something about you heard what tremendous leadership there was, especially on the board of selectmen? The board of selectmen chair especially. You better be careful. No further questions. You said city versus town. You got two right there. So, well, I'll go last. You'll go last. I was going to go by seniority. So if you want, I'm talking all the time. No, that's what questions you have for Richard. And I'm kind of joking about that. But I'll tell you, if you get up before town meeting and you refer to us as a city, a lot of people are going to pick up on that. As well as a comptroller position, attention to detail. I'm going to try to limit my questions just because I have the opportunity to go first. So I guess I'll just ask two. My first question would be in terms of I know you were at the town in Winam and now the cities of Salomon, Everett. Here in Arlington, as you're probably aware, people look at the comptroller, sort of a check and balance and reports to the board of selectmen. What I would like to ask you is a twofold question. First of all, what sort of interface do you see with the selectmen in terms of do you have in your mind or is there something you come up with in terms of reporting back to the full board in terms of an annual, semi-annual, once a year, twice a year sort of basis? That would be my first question. I'm just kind of looking to what you're going to do to work cooperatively with the board in terms of coming back to us. What's most comfortable for you? And I'm not giving you to this. What I typically do right now in my current situation, I have a committee of administration finance and I give them monthly reports on expenditures, the other date on our enterprise fund and on our general fund. I attend every meeting, I answer any questions and after that, I just, as needed, if someone asks them information for me, I give them whatever they ask for, but short of knowing exactly what the routine is, my standard thing would be to report the budget to actual expenditure reports. And if you do revenue reporting, we can give you budget to actual revenue reports. And again, just to be there and to answer any questions, I think would be the most effective way, not being a minor reader or not knowing what you'd like to see. And certainly once I get a little bit better feel of how business is running, I will try to work to the board and what their needs are, whether it's capital items, whether it's projects and floorcasts, et cetera. So I hope that answers your question. Okay, that's fine. I just want to, I guess, I'm sure this came across in the interviews, even though it was sort of a widely encapsulating in terms of people that were on the interview committee, the comptroller, as you know, is hired and overseen by the board of selectmen and a lot of people in town. See you as, and Ruth Lewis previously, is sort of the checks and balance. And so one of your main, in my opinion, one of your main duties would be the relationship that you do establish with the board and a lot of that is communication. But as you say, you'll do some more homework and kind of get up to speed on that. I'll ask my second question and I'll just tell you one thing. Anything you ever send me, whether it's written word or budgets or capital planning or projections or communications with the DOR, like my colleagues, definitely read everything will be the first one to call upon you or others in your staff to explain that to me because I am a little challenged by numbers but I've learned if I do a little bit of query that I can usually get there. So just trying to define who I am. The second one would be you highlighted in terms of your highlights, the internal controls that you had put in place in the various jobs that you had held. And I was just wondering what thought you might have given to where there is a townside and a school side. And there has been talk about a consolidated finance committee group bringing the two together. But right now you do have a townside and a school side. You will be the comptroller upon a successful vote. I know that Powers and Sullivan is our external auditor that does our audits for us. I'm just wondering when you get the management letter back from a Powers and Sullivan or whatever, and there are recommendations and suggestions. I was wondering if you could speak to some of the internal controls that you really felt were highlights or successful. Might have been sort of something that was never done before. Just where you put that down is one of your highlights if you could kind of just expand on that a little. Yeah, the highlights of my internal controls is that unfortunately a lot of the places where I worked didn't have any. So it was my job to actually implement them. I can give you examples of water and sewer enterprise fund people who are putting the bills in, entering the bills, also have the ability to abate the bills and adjust the bills. That's a check and balance data has to be segregated. It has to be proper internal controls on the software who has access to doing what functions. I mean that's the biggest risk is making sure that just like the treasure and the comptroller, they have to have separate duties so there's no collusion or ability to manipulate funds. Internal controls aren't receivable just to make sure that everyone's communicating the assesses to the collectors. Collect this to the auditors, make sure that the overlays book, make sure all of the monthly abatements are booked, any adjustments, any kind of exemption you may have for veterans, survivors, spouses. Just to make sure that everyone's doing what they're supposed to do when you get together every month in reconcile and just have good internals closely when you look at the books at the year end they reconcile and you don't have to try to do 12 months worth of work to figure out why you're off on your reconciliation. How much more do you want? I'll stop, because I think my colleagues will probably ask everything else I want to ask. I'll stop there. Okay, thank you, Mr. Dunn. Welcome. Thank you. I guess my first question is, so thinking about what, I don't know, your first couple months or something like that in this job. What do you think you'd get done? What would be your goals? Like what would you look back and say, this is what I want to get to, you know, what do I want to do in the beginning? Well, first I want to get a familiarity with the, what the staff's functions are and what they do. And hopefully get a chance to have Ruth come in and show me what her monthly routine is. And again, what kind of reports are required of the select and what kind of reports are required of the town manager? Who's doing what? And then just taking an assessment, not really to go into change the world there, but just to see how things operate, how the treasurer and the auditor, I mean, the comptroller, reconcile their funds, how the assessor's role plays in there. Just get a good feel of what the financial team is. Of course, talk to the town manager and he says, town manager, about, you know, day to day operations, what's expected. And then start to look to it, what the goals are and objectives and just create kind of a bit of a timeline on how the fiscal operation works. Because once you get it after the first year, it tends to be pretty cyclical. So just want to get involved with who's doing what and then try to bring some of my expertise and my abilities and try to just, I mean, it's a well run community. So in some respects, I want to make sure it doesn't go down. It's tough to go up with AAA, but certainly want to improve and just try to find ways to do things better and more efficient and hopefully work well to communicate that information with the residents and the select men and all the stakeholders. Okay, one more, Mr. Chairman, and then I'll move on. So one of the things I find unusual about this job is being selected, by the way, is doing public interviews. So interviewing Adam, for instance, for his job and doing it publicly. It can be really awkward sometimes, but it's part of the, as you know, it's part of the thing. So here we are with a question that is probably easier to ask and answer when you don't have television cameras. When you look at who you're going to be working with in this job, some of them are people that you're going to be working for. And some of them are people who work for you. But then there's a lot of people that you're going to be working with who you don't have that relationship with. Like they answer to another authority. So for example, the treasurer is directly elected, the assessors are directly elected. The director of assessment, you know, and you're going to periodically need to do things or ask in the CFO reports to, of course, the school committee, and they're directly elected. Can you give me an example of a time when you were working when a relationship was like that and you weren't getting what you needed? Like, you know, there was friction or conflict or something like that and how you managed that? What I'm saying is, it's not always going to be easy. Can you give me an example of a time where you ran into that conflict and how you managed it? Sure. I mean, just in the current situation I'm in right now, we have an assessor that falls under the direction of the CFO, but they report to a board of assessors. And again, we're having trouble reconciling, overlay, and have to go in there and just explain what the proper process is and just try to drill down and find out what exactly they're doing. Regardless of who they answer to or work for, there's a fall of work that has to come through. So just to get familiar with what happens at a board meeting, when you've given abatement, how is it filed? How do you put it in the system? How do you send it over to the collector and then ultimately to the heiress? So basically just get everyone around the table, talk about what the steps are being taken, and you end up finding out a little more information on whether it's posting an abatement on the date you type it versus the date it was actually granted.  So just a guy to get an idea and say, oh, when you put an abatement on the 12th of June, make sure you date it May 18th, because that was the meeting date so that we understand what each other are doing. Because the system talks to each other in a different way, so basically just communicating and working together with people, I mean, who they report to is less important than what exactly is the problem and how can we address those problems? Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Mr. Cura. Thank you very much. Thank you for coming in. I think some of my thinking was on the same lines with Ms. Mohan.  And I have kind of a two-part question. I was wondering what you see as the biggest difference between working in the two, the two different governmental systems. Obviously, you've been in the last nine years in cities. I'll put that out there just on its own and follow up. Politics. I mean, it's an elected mayor position and sometimes the mayor is busy trying to get elected as opposed to running good government. And that's where I have to step up and just make sure that everything's done in accordance to the mass general laws and make sure we're doing our requirements with the DOI and such. And you tend to get a better understanding of that when you work with a town manager who's not worried about getting reelected every two years or four years. It creates a bit more stable environment, which is what I find I like better than the city, political, every two-year elections type of system. Okay. And kind of following up on some of what Ms. Mohan had been asking about. I know I see in your resume that you've put a lot of emphasis on kind of reporting and you've won some awards for your reporting. I'm wondering how you deal in a town environment like this. Well, to Mr. Dunn's point, we do have very dispersed leadership and although you ultimately report to the board of selectmen, there are a lot of different reporting needs from the different branches. For example, I know that the school committee likes to get monthly budget to actuals reports. I know that the finance committee often pulls reports and makes requests on an ad hoc basis. We interface with the comptroller's office also, you know, often through the audit or through the long-range planning process. And I was wondering how you balance all those. If you see a role as learning the processes and practices that are already in place or if you have some best practices that you look to bring in to the job from your previous experience. Well, I mean, I would think it's a hybrid. I certainly think I've put some best practices in place, but certainly want to come in and see what's going on now. And I come to a community and I find that they're doing something that I've never seen that I think is really neat as well. So it's a lot of the systems that are same but different. I mean, I created five-year financial forecast for a long-range plan and capital plans. But I've also looked at how this town does it. And I think there's certain aspects that I say, oh, that's a really good way of looking at it. Some communities are more concerned with Prop 2.5 and being up against that levy limit in the city. Sometimes we don't have that. It's not so much about taxes that are levy because we have excess capacity. So some of the analysis and dynamics are different. But my first goal is to find out what's going on, how businesses run, how reports are done, how the communication is to the various boards and committees, and then get to know the people and get to feedback of what they'd like to see or maybe questions they've had in the past that never got answered and hopefully provide each and every one of them what they need to help them do their job the best they could. Okay, thanks. And my last question is, your last three positions, you've been either the chief financial officer or the finance director. Comptroller is obviously a very discreet role in comparison to that. And I'm wondering how you approach that coming in and kind of making almost a transition. Well, all three of the positions I've had as finance director of CFO have always been with the town accountant or city auditor set. So I've always been on the general side of the equation. The other fun stuff that come with it is just more or less the communication and the umbrella effect so that in a city a lot of times you want to ask one person what's going on with all these departments. So it creates efficiencies and senior staff means and such. But at the end of the day, I've always been an accountant. I've been a Comptroller type position. So that's my strength and that's what I feel I can accelerate even further because a lot of the other distraction may not be with this job. So I'm looking forward to just to kind of dig down on numbers and again raise the bar and hopefully improve upon any systems in place. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you. Mr. Byrd. Thank you, Mr. Greeley. And for you, sir, I do want to thank the hiring board. It seems like quite an in-depth process played out in a pretty short amount of time. And it seems like you landed on a pretty good candidate, particularly from the resume in this book that we have in front of us. And Rich, thank you for being here with us tonight. Could you talk a little bit about your management experience and style and how that's going to translate over here? Sure. I like to manage in a way that fosters a lot of good relationships and teamwork. I like to try to teach people not just how to do something, but why they're doing it and what the effect is on the different parts of the operation. Certainly, I like to think that I can talk from the town manager right down to the custodians and the laymen in the city that may have questions about whether it's taxes or how the capital plan is put together or anything like that. But basically just good communication. I pretty much always had an open-door policy with my employees and my colleagues to come in and discuss any matters. But just trying to teach when I can teach, listen when I can listen, and then come up with conclusions and solutions to the problems. But more like just teamwork and good communication. That's great. This may be a little bit redundant, but looking at some of your former colleagues and maybe some of the people you not only worked that worked for you, but also worked with you. What would they say about your customer service experience? Not only does the control do the books from on a day-to-day basis, but you serve on a lot of committees. You're interacting with the public on a regular basis, and that's certainly a big role here. Can you talk a little bit about that? What would your former colleagues say about your experience dealing with the public? I think they say I do a pretty good job. I like to think I'm a clear communicator. I'm more of a business memo type of format, so I try not to do long, wordy emails or memos. I try to be clear, concise type of bullet points. But I know that in my role right now, I communicate twice a month with the council. I'm pretty much the figurehead speaker on any money or the financial matter appropriation. So I do a lot of that with the council, with the committees. And it's funny, I get a lot of feedback on the streets when I'm at the supermarket or I'm in a store and people come up to me and say, hey, you're the CFO aren't you? And I say, yeah, I like what you're doing. I like the way you explain stuff and everything else. So that feedback is really helpful because when you're up there and you're talking, you're not really thinking too much about it, but when people come back and appreciate how you conduct yourself and explain yourself, it makes me feel like I'm doing a good job at that communication. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Did you get everything answered? Well, you said after your colleagues. If I could just do maybe a brief sort of follow-up. I'm just wondering, we're interviewing you and posing questions to you. Sort of what you've done to look into the town, and I want to stress that again, we're a town. If you keep slipping and say city, it may not seem like a big thing, but it is. What sort of pre-op investigation have you done about the town of Allington? Is there anything that you looked at that you highlighted in terms of something very good, something that you really want to sink your teeth into? I'd just like to know, we're making so many queries of you, what you've done on behalf of yourself in terms of what the job with the town of Allington is attractive to you and sort of what you've done in that, or if you have a question for any of us. Well, I went on the town website. I read the budget. I downloaded the official statement. I read the rear official statement. I looked at the tax rate, recap, erratic lens reports. I do have some friends and colleagues that are familiar with the town that work in the town. I've just asked a bunch of general questions about how the town is managed. I asked about Adam for people to know him. Like I said, I know it's a triple-a-rated community. I work with First Salt West. You guys work with First Salt West. I've been quiet with them about it. Jim Powers is my auditor as well, so I know Powers and Sullivan. I got a bunch of general knowledge about the town, and I looked at the financials, and I've read the last boundary and that's the end of the report, so those are the types of things that I was interested in looking at. Okay, thank you. Anybody else have any other questions? One of the questions we asked each colleague was how they prepared for the interview, and Richard presented us with this at the interview, which, and others didn't present any such things. So, Richard, do you have any questions for us at this point? At this point, I don't have any questions. I just hope I answered all your questions, and I really hope that the vote is favorable, and I'm happy to answer any other questions. If you have any, and I would vote for the opportunity to work with you all. Okay, thank you. So then at this point, Karen, could I ask you, would you take Rich just out and, you know, just set him at the, in a bench out there while we have a chance to discuss. Thank you very much. You can bid on some art. Don't go on Instagram. Well, you can come back. I didn't mean you have to leave, but no, Richard, you have to register. Oh, I don't want that. Thank you. I never heard him call us a city. He did it twice. I heard him say it was a city of Salem. No, he said it twice. He said it in his opening, and then he said it in the answer to a question from the right. That's all. I didn't. I don't have any comments. Anybody want to give impressions or thoughts? I definitely, I rely, I'm relying mostly on the recommendation of the committee, but he certainly did fine in this interview. But in terms of why I'm going to vote yes, is going to be because of the recommendation that you all have given. I'm on board with that. I mean, I think his credentials are, you know, pretty solid. It's a good mix of experience. I like the DOR experience as well before he got into municipal government. I guess I would ask either the chairman or the town manager, having been through interview processes before and being in a position. Most of the times I've been really, you know, 100%, 110% there. There's only been one other time, which was a totally different circumstance, but I'm just wondering, maybe two questions, why we didn't have a second candidate and I understand from what was said initially, it's because this candidate rose so much to the top and with a comptroller position, to me, what's really important is attention to detail, not just knowing that Ellington's a town versus city, but as well as, I definitely appreciate coming in and walking into something that is a well tuned machine that is working really great, but I'm also looking for sort of some semblance of them coming in versus just riding on what has existed, et cetera, where I think so many people have said to me with the current town manager, and nothing about any previous town managers even before I was, was that really being in tune with the time in terms of transparency and taking advantage of technology and things like that. So I guess my question would be, and I'm not trying to be critical, I'm just, guys know how I am, how did this candidate rise to the top versus having a second to compare to, what is it that really, if you could just not sell me on that, but do you understand what I'm saying? Yeah, so I want to sell you, so let me answer it first. This being the third interview I've been with him, it was his worst, it wasn't great, but it was. I mean, I felt he maybe was even more nervous this time, but I, again, will certainly let Karen or Adam, he so clearly knows what he's doing, which came through, certainly through the assessment center of all seven of the candidates. And the other, for example, one of the three candidates, the finalists, didn't even attempt to try one of the two parts of the assessment center. The third one, the third candidate, well, we can't use names or anything, but the second candidate that we all felt should this one not work out, we felt would do a great job, but she did an awful lot of saying what she'd need to learn if she came to Arlington. You know, as in, well, I haven't done that part of it before, or I haven't done that part of it before. So, you know, I really am trusting much more Adam, Steven, and Diane in terms of his capabilities of doing this job. But what to me came through, not as clearly tonight, is this guy loves this kind of work. And can I talk about one of the, the mistake you made professionally, question that we asked, should I not do that publicly? I'm just going to say, can you share in the assessment stuff or no? Well, the assessment. That's one of the questions. Okay, all right. So, you know, as I say, this was my third interview with him. There is no question in my mind, I'd like to work with this guy. But again, of three interviews I did with him, I just, I don't think this was his shining moment, necessarily. I would just like to say a couple of things because I did get to speak to his references and the quality of the people that he had me speak to. You know, Mayor Driscoll from Salem, Peter Frazier from First Southwest. I think it's Paul Saguerino, not Peter Saguerino, who is the town accountant in Burlington. These are very well respected people and they just had excellent things to say about him. And the things that he said in the interview that really impressed me were what he wanted to do for the town, how he was going to come here and help us make a great organization even better. It wasn't a lot about what he was going to do for himself. It's that he wanted to help us make a great town even better. The things that they said about him were that he's not just a numbers guy, that he's actually a brilliant budget strategist. Like he's going to help you get where you want to go. And then it's not about his ego that people really, really like him. The people, not just the people up in the organization, but the people who worked below him in the organization really, really like this gentleman. They say he's just buried down to earth and he has a great personality. So a lot of times there's the numbers people and then there's a lot of time. There's the personality people and a gentleman seems to be a rare combination of those two things. And coming from those three individuals, I thought that that was saying something. So I just thought you should consider that. Thank you. Adam. So I'll start where you finished, Mr. Chairman, in that he, in the first somewhat and then on the second, absolutely impressed me as really being a municipal finance nerd. And not to use a silly term. I mean, he clearly lives, sleeps, eats, and breeds this stuff. And it came out again in that second interview that he was passionate about local government. So that was probably the number one thing that attracted me to his candidacy. And he definitely had sort of the breath and scope of complexity that Arlington has in terms of its financials from his experience in Salem and his experience in Everett. City government, as I know from my past experience, is certainly much different. His complexities and sometimes relationship and political complexities can mirror some of the relationship building that we have to do here. He didn't get into it a lot, but working with the city council when you report to the mayor, but still trying to have good relationships with those counselors. So you have to be before twice a month is very, very challenging to do. So having that skill set. And again, I agree with you, Mr. Chairman. It didn't come across quite as clearly tonight as you could use. But he was very impressive. The other thing I'll say, Miss Mahan, in response to your second piece, I would frankly be suspicious of somebody who had never worked in the organization before, who came to an interview table and had a list of things that he or she would improve. Because they don't know. They've not been in the organization. They've not worked a day in the organization. And I think the right answer to that question from any candidate is, I got to come in and see how things are going so that's how I would, no matter who the candidate was for any position, if someone comes in and says, ah, I'm going to fix things. If they've not worked here before, I might think them a fool for assuming that they know everything having not stepped through the door. I mean, I guess I would say to that, I guess I'm going to take a little assurance that one interview, one and two, we did better. And tonight maybe he was very nervous or maybe he thought it's a slam dunk. I don't mean it. He hit a home run. What I was looking for on that is definitely attention to detail, but thinking of the comptroller position, similar to any other financial position, whether you're dealing with health care, retirement, etc. I would really knock it out of the ballpark for me. And maybe he thinks, you know, he has done that and maybe he has. I'm just a minority. He's familiar with powers in Sullivan. It's the same organization consultant that works with the city of Everett. I looked at your last management letter and recommendations and I see that for me, what I would have I've never been a comptroller, but I'm just thinking of, and I haven't just done interviews as a member of the board of select men. I've done it with Verizon, AT&T, etc. Just looking, you did a little digging. You kind of want to get a bonus point. I was thinking maybe he could either say, management letter, and I saw that you had the situation and the correction was, etc. And that's similar to what happened in the town of Wendemers. I wasn't looking for, so. I don't want to get in the position of defending his answers. He did say he read the official statements, and when he says that, he means the audit documents, because that's a term that would be used. And I think, again, I can rely on my own experience to say this, you know, he's probably coming from cities that while he was there, and if his resume is accurate, 40, 50, maybe 60 comments in the management letter. So we have three. So it's not necessarily something that someone from his position would look at and say, you know, there's a whole list of things that I got to go down to address, because by comparison, it's a very clean report. I'm going to stop, because I can see I'm in the minority. I'll stop there. I think we get more than three, but that's okay. I want to see what everyone else has to say. I'm just... No, I think I agree with Mr. Dunn that the work you guys did is quite impressive, and I'm happy to go along with it. But what really struck me is that the assessment, when he came out, he clearly did the best. And that's what I'm really looking for. If he's, you know, going to be working on, you know, with these numbers day in and day out, you want the person who did the best and, you know, under tight circumstances. And hearing what Karen has to say about his references, I'm pretty impressed by him. So, I'm a go. Thank you. Yeah, Joe. Yeah, I have one more question. I probably should have addressed it to the candidate, but I'll address it to the manager and the others on the committee. Did you have an opportunity to talk to him about the long-range planning process that we use to control his role in that? Because the controller has a seat at the table in that. No, but he explained how he developed that in the effort. Well, so I would actually say he did specifically, forgetting which of the settings he asked, but he did specifically ask how the long-range plan worked. He had seen the fiscal stability fund looking through some town meeting warrants and seeing the appropriations and did ask me to give a quick explanation with the confines of the interview of how the long-range plan worked. Anybody ready to make a motion? Mr. Dunn. What is the appropriate motion? The first is to hire him and then the second would be to ask me to negotiate a contract with him. I move that we hire Richard Biscay as our controller. Is there a second? Second. Further discussion? Although discussion, sure. It's actually just a question about, I think we all are. Is there any part of that assessment that Andrew spoke about that we can actually receive in written form or no? That's a protected document. I don't know why you could say that. I think if I see the because I think I'll see Rich interview one, interview two and that will, and then I assume as Dan Dunn asked in his question that, you know, within the first four to six, eight weeks he'll meet with us individually. I'm just trying to get prepared for that. He was a middle finalist that we interviewed so I wish you could have been part of the other two interviews to see why, at least I am so clear that this guy is the best. I'm going to be strongly guided by and I'm not being sarcastic or anything by the chairman and the town manager and Karen and others that have spent and gone through three rounds of interview and, you know, I totally get it the first two interviews, you know, if you had to rate them all and I really do take that to heart. So I'm definitely prepared to vote for this candidate if I could see that so that maybe when I have my sit-down interview with him and I'll talk to you first just where you were involved with the process to make sure that am I kind of interpreting this correctly. Sure. All right, thanks. Okay. So all those in favor of the motion I, Mr. Dunn, please signify by saying aye. Aye. All those opposed. So would you ask him back in, please? So thank you for the trustee. I'm sorry to keep you in motion. Move approval. I would like to request that the chairman on behalf of the board of select men enter into negotiations with Rich Viscae. Mr. Gay. I apologize. No, that's okay. Rich Viscae Jr., with any other department head, town manager that he deans necessary to engage in those negotiations. Second discussion. So thank you for the trust you've shown in Adam and I. Probably some sweat on this brow right now. That was a little longer, right, baby, than you thought. I offer two seconds of new business as he walks back in. If any of the board members are interested in attending the site walk schedules for the Mugar property next Tuesday at 10 a.m., the meeting point at 10 a.m. will be the Thorndike Field Park. And I'm out of town, so I can't be there. But you said you could be there, right? 23rd. And of course, all my colleagues want to wish my Cindy a happy 23rd birthday and I'll be home to help blow out the candles. That's that day? Tonight. Oh, tonight? Yes. Happy birthday, Cindy. Thank you. And welcome to the town of Arlington, Mr. Viscay. On a 5-0 vote, we voted to appoint you our next controller. However, the second vote is for you and I to enter into a contract negotiation. So congratulations. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Meeting adjourned or something else. And that's, Rich, anything you want to do, clean up or? Give us a quick, send us off on a high. Higher, send us off higher. I just want to thank you very much for the opportunity and the confidence that you're putting in me to serve as the town's controller. Thank you, Rich. And serve the board of select them here. And I would forward to getting started. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. I've moved to adjourn. Move. Second. All those in favor, please say goodbye by saying aye. Next meeting on the board of selectmen is June 29th. Good night, Arlington. Happy birthday, Cindy. Thank you, Mr. Curt. The next regular meeting. Yes.