Hello and welcome to NewsClicks International Roundup. Last week, Israel passed its controversial nation-state law, which mandates that the right to self-determination is available only for its Jewish citizens. This basically disenfranchises a large part of its population of Arab citizens. This is the latest in Israel's provocations along with its ally the United States, which include the shifting of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem as well as the horrific attacks on Gaza. To talk more about this, we have with us Prabir Purghais, Founding and International NewsClick. Hello, Prabir. Prabir, let's start with the law. What exactly is the reason for such a blatant provocation in the face of international condemnation? I think we have to see the larger context that is operating here. There has been a pressure for quite some time that what Israel is doing is not right, that the two-state solution is in danger. There have been different kinds of sanctions, if you will, at least if not direct sanctions, but not allowing goods from occupied territories to come in as granted as Israeli goods. So a lot of issues have been coming up on that. I think this is Israel's way of letting the world know that they don't really care and the two-state solution is finally dead because what they're saying is the Jewish community is the only one with the right to self-determination. Israel, as you know, has never declared its borders. So essentially what it is saying is this is their historical land. What the extent of this historical land, we don't know. But whichever community is there, they don't have any right of a nationality here and only the Jewish nationality. And again, the question is can we have a religious identity used as a nationality, which is what they have done in this case, that they are the only ones who have the right to decide the borders of this state. This is really what I think that the lying issue really is. We must also remember this is not the first anti-apartheid law that Israel has on its books. There are a huge number of laws which essentially disenfranchise in different ways. The Arab population, or shall we say the non-Jewish identity-based population, because Arabs are not Muslims alone, they're also Christians. So this is the second part of it that already disenfranchisement was in the process. They have not only passed this law, they have also made Arabic, which was an official language in Israel, no longer an official language. All of this really is the sort of seal, the final seal, that the two-state solution is dead, and now there'll be only one state and that will be only a Jewish state. So this is the declaration that this particular law really signals. And I think it's a part of a larger process, which Trump and Netanyahu have set in process with what you mentioned earlier, Israel shifting its capital, Jerusalem, and the U.S. accepting it. So you mentioned the two-state solution, for instance. Along with all these developments, there's been also a massive increase in the violence in Gaza, the firing on the protesters, or the Great Return March, for instance. At the same time, for instance, you have Trump's so-called leader of the century, which is basically being done without even the involvement of the Palestinian authority. So do we also see basically an attempt to encircle and basically crush the Palestinian, even the small possibility of a Palestinian state? I think what Trump is signaling, along with the Netanyahu's this particular law, is the end of the two-state solution. So therefore, the two-state solution is essentially of the books. This is what Trump and Netanyahu are signaling. What is the consequence of this? This means that in the final negotiations for Israel, and please remember, it is Israel that we are discussing, not the Palestinians. Palestinian people will not even be represented at the table. So the discussion is about Israel's boundaries, about Israel's security, and how this can be secured in consultation with Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, of course with the United States, and possibly Russia being also involved in these negotiations. This is the attempt. If this has to succeed, two of the things have to happen. One is they have to make Gaza go away in some form. Therefore, they have to bully the Hamas to a point where they, like Yasser Arafat did with the PLO, proceed to a peace process which will involve Gaza being held by Egypt under some kind of arrangement, where the Israelis and the Americans will put in money to have industries, not in Gaza, but maybe in Sinai and under Egypt's jurisdiction. And then Gaza will be asked that you start being an autonomous region, and you start building a relationship with Egypt. So Egypt essentially takes over from Israel as the protector of Gaza. Now, will Egypt agree to it? Because after all, Gaza has one million people, and Hamas are quite strong over there. They are aligned to the Islamic Muslim Brotherhood. And therefore, this increases the strength of Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. So will Egypt agree to that? That is a big question. Can there be, quote, unquote, bribed by Saudi Arabia and the United States and Israelis? Of course, Israelis don't have to spend the money. The other two countries will spend the money to a solution like this. So this also explains why this repeated attacks on Hamas right now, not only in the border protests that we saw earlier, where sniper fire was used against unarmed protesters, but regular now attacks on Gaza, airstrikes, almost every week that this is happening. So I think you cannot understand it unless you look at the larger picture of what Israel and the United States are trying to get as a solution. And the solution minus Palestinians, who today are actually, as you know, probably more than the Jewish population in what counts for the greater Israel. So taking one million out of there would leave that with the minority of Palestinians, but a small minority. And then if they can also range for some of the deals with Jordan, it's possible. That they will then talk about the solution. We reached the deal of the century, what you called it. And this will then permanently in their books take the Palestinians out of the equation. Of course, it's disenfranchised and in an apathetic state. But how would you, for instance, see the global shifts that brought us to this point? Like even, for instance, say, four or five years ago when the Obama administration was in power, there was at least a pretence of carrying some sort of a peace agreement and even if you look at the states in the region themselves, Saudi Arabia or Egypt for that matter. So how did we reach a position today when everyone else is basically in agreement that this is actually the best way to go ahead? I don't think there is an agreement on this as yet. I don't think Egypt has agreed to it. I don't know whether Saudi Arabia will be publicly willing to accept it unless there is a larger consensus on the ground. I think what Israel and the United States are dealing with is the fact that there is a weakening of American hegemony on West Asia. And if you see that weakening, then the paramount issue for Israel as well as the United States is how to protect Israel under conditions for when United States is in the state of withdrawal. State of withdrawal doesn't mean Israel or America's military power is declined. What has happened, it's geostrategic influence in the area, particularly United States has weakened. And this weakened in the face of the developments in Iran, where Iran is the, of course, it's 80 billion people. It has a big economy. It has a huge oil and gas reserve. And you have also the coming back of Russia to West Asia with Syria. So you have a state where United States at one point had complete dominance of West Asia, partly because Iran had been weakened and the fact that Russia had withdrawn essentially. And under Yeltsin was willing to throw the American line. I think this changes that have taken place means that now Israel is concerned that how does it guarantees long-term superior of existence. Under conditions where it is no longer the preeminent military power and the United States is not the global hegemon and certainly not the West Asian hegemon. Under these conditions now, what is seen to be offensive is actually a defensive maneuver. So I don't think it expresses the strength of United States or Israel. It really exposes that it feels it's weak. So it needs at this point to get some kind of an agreement by which can says it has solved the problem. Of course, long-term issue is it's now only 6 million people in the region which is about 250 to 300 million people. Is that a long-term viable position for a state acting as a garrison state on behalf of the West to survive in this form without an accommodation with any of the states bordering it? Is it possible for it to survive in this fashion as an apartheid state? These are questions historically I think which Israel does face. It's an existential issue for Zionism and let's face it. This can survive in the short term, but in the long term, its future does not appear to be very bright. So I think they are facing a bleak future in the long term. They know it. Therefore, they're trying to show it up today by these kind of measures. And if internationally they can get away with it for the time being, this is the juncture for them to try it. Egypt, I guess Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt, military dictatorship. Saudi Arabia on their sides because it's trying to contain Iran. So all of this may give it a window of opportunity it feels by which they can reach this particular agreement and then hope that the Palestinian problem will be considered a salt by the world and therefore it will no longer be seen to be a divisive issue. But at the same time, we've also seen a lot of resistance building up on the ground both in Palestine as well as internationally, for instance, where with the success of the BDS movement in multiple areas in recent times. So like you said, it is difficult for them to sustain in the wrong and especially in terms of both international opinion as well as regional developments as it is. Well, the regional developments at the moment do not augur well for Israel. Immediately, Syria has certainly merged as a military power. And like Hezbollah, today it is battle-hearted. The Syrian troops are battle-hearted. Therefore, it's not going to be easy for Israel to attack Syria. Like it could have dominated over Syria in the earlier period. It cannot enter after 2006, 11 on again. At the same time, it is also true that the Arab world has never been as divided as it is today, particularly with Saudi Arabia on one side and Qatar fighting against its Emirates, lining with Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, and passing to different kinds of destruction of their state vis-a-vis the kind of wars that the US has launched or the proxy war US has launched. So these are the countervailing features. Why Israel thinks this may be an opportunity time for it to get the settlement? But yes, I would say that long-term, as I said, the prospects of a state surviving as an apartheid state and Israel has openly declared itself to be an apartheid state, I think is bleak. The geopolitically, Israel's biggest backer, as you know, is the United States. And the United States internal politics has yet not shifted. Don't forget, the Vietnam War was not won only in Vietnam. It had to be also won back home in the United States. So unless the United States shifts or it declines dramatically, both of which is not an immediate prospect, I think we are going to see a continuation of the Palestinian agony. And this is going to be, for the future, a hot spot that is not going to go away in spite of what Israel and the United States may proclaim. But a short-term solution without the Palestinians negotiating only with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Israelis, and the United States, trying to reach a so-called agreement, is possibly on the cards. Thank you, Prabir. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching this link.


So please a warm open group. Welcome for Cheryl McKinnon So good morning. Thank you so much for the invitation from the open group and for soup for inviting me It's my privilege to be here amongst all of these lovely faces.  I know our company has been tracking supply chains since 2005 Which is approximately when that picture was taken that you saw up there, but it's my favorite and I'm sticking to it All right, the history goes You know, I was invited to talk about what the process is and what the value proposition is for me and my company I wanted to go into a little bit more detail of the journey to get here so Back in 2005 was when I first was introduced to the issues surrounding counterfeit equipment When the FAR council invited everybody into Bethesda, Maryland and they start bringing up all of these counterfeit pictures of various OEMs and there was a conflict between what was actually counterfeit and What was not, you know, what's a warranty? So this has gone through an evolution over time So back in 2009 the government came to the open group and said hey We've got to do something about this as the government's moving away from GOTS products to COTS products They needed some way to Help to ensure that the equipment that they were getting was not counterfeit There were bills going up into Congress that were gonna cost Tens of millions of dollars in penalties and everybody's throwing up their hands going wait a minute You still haven't clearly defined what counterfeit equipment is. So again, they had to go through this whole evolution So when we heard of the ISO IEC 20243 coming about We were first We were trying to find a way to give our company the golden stamp of approval that we're already here We're already doing everything that NIST says We're already doing what our OEMs want us to do and getting that certification was really We just had to do it, right? Okay, so I'm gonna move on Whoa All right. Sorry about that. That was a huge jump All right, so I'm gonna tell you a little bit about the process I'm gonna tell you a little bit about the certification and what it's done for us and then what's next There All right When you make a determination that you're gonna go after this certification There's some some decisions that you have to make right you can do a self-certification or you can do a third-party accreditation right CVWG chose to do the self-certification it was low-cost and That was a starter because every company has to go out and they have to develop a budget of what they're gonna do for the year And if all of a sudden you come in and you find this new opportunity that you have to have it It's not necessarily in the budget that third-party certification or accreditation process tends to be a little bit more pricey So CDWG chose to go for the low-cost option. It was it was $4,000 We did you have to make a decision of what are you going to certify?  Are you gonna certify a product line? Are you gonna certify a business unit those kinds of things CDWG opted to Certify for the entire business unit of CDWG It's a for document process The most time you will spend is on the certification Excuse me the conformance statement. Sorry about that So this is where you basically have to be very honest with yourself and look at your processes and procedures And clearly identify it CDWG started the process and we started talking about the process in December of 2016 We had a lot of conversation We had to figure out wait a minute where the gaps we went through and identified here are all of our processes Here are the things that we need to work on while going through the processes. These are the things that we can fix Fix them we did So what we went through the process we turned in all the documents There are some system glitches on the open group side since we were the first eight or some Anomalies they hadn't quite figured out yet which have since been fixed and we were awarded the certification in May of 2017 Not not a bad gig Okay, the next thing you have to do is Marketplace awareness marketing everybody's got to market it Once you get it you just don't sit on it. This is your golden stamp of approval that you know what you are doing The whole idea behind the ISO certification is to ensure that there's no malicious intent and incorporating Counterfeit product into the products that we sell because when you do that things go really bad. I saw a recent news story How many are here from the Washington, DC area hands up You may have seen this news story. Thank you very much. You may have seen this there was a first-time surgery To repair a young girl's scoliosis in the rest rest in hospital anybody see that All right, you know what I'm talking about All of this the surgeon was fantastic I found out afterwards that the surgery went really really well, so don't let me scare you to death But this was all done by a robotic arm and all the software that goes around it to really navigate where every Bracket and every screw goes and if one piece of that technology Went bad as a parent. I'm freaking out What's gonna happen if something glitches in that robotic arm that? That's my daughter on a table things go bad when you have bad technology and This is what this certification helps you do to show that to golden stamp of approval to your federal government customers right It labels you as a trusted supplier It gives you the opportunity to sit at the table with your government customer and go look I'm good There's some bad players out there. I'm not one of them. I have this certification. I've already been accredited Here's my golden stamp that says you don't need to look any farther If you want to come in check out my processes. Okay, you have the right to do that But I'm telling you I've already done it for you.  I'll just I'll use the name Cisco You can name any of them in that app Nutanix whatever If they're selling a counterfeit product and claiming it it's this OEM It doesn't necessarily go back to that bad actor.  I have the certifications to take your product. I know where to buy it from I know how to transport it. I know how to integrate it and I'm not going to mess up the integrity of your brand name Right Right. Alrighty This also helps us to align with our government partners, right? We we all want to make sure that nothing goes bad.  We don't you know, these are our taxpayers dollars because every time something goes wrong It's our taxpayers dollars that pay for it. All right So what's next? I've got it. I Know there's a few of you that have the certification. Are you in the room? All right congratulations Right, don't stop here Look technology and evolves you go back to Manufacturing there's so much robotics and manufacturing now it used to be people sitting behind It doesn't happen that way anymore delivery changes We've got thrones delivering stuff to our front door, right? So things change regulations change So you need to stay focused Keep your eye on the ball Don't stop here Things continue to change be aware of them stay on top of them. It's a journey. It's a long journey Talking about delivery of products Delivery of things on your doorstep. You want to go back to the future and go to Star Trek days and go Hey, Scottie beam me up Maybe one day that'll happen. I Don't know just say it when you go back when you went back to Disney World and saw all the technology back in the 1960s where oh Somebody's actually talking to their mother on their cell phone and seeing their face Things change they evolve those things that we saw on TV or that were futuristic are here now and today Who knows where they're gonna be tomorrow? Thank you Oh, I wasn't ready for this one Yeah, we've had a few people using Slido, please keep going with with Slido Yeah, several questions for you, thank you very much. It was nice to hear the point of view from the other side of the Events so what it's like from to actually go through the process and that's really what these questions are questions are about Yes, it's what's involved in certification from a soup contract holders point of view I mean you kind of described The product standard, but you know what's involved in getting certified Under the OTQBS program So If you go out to the open group website, there is a list of Documents that you have to prepare it's really for documents and as the slides indicated I didn't go into each one You have to complete them and you have to do a self certification process I am unfamiliar with the third-party accreditation process But I have been through several other accreditation processes that can be quite intense and costly But I would assume and maybe you can answer that question better than I can about the third-party certification Yeah, there's there's actually a separate question on that is Relative time frames for those and we are gonna hear more about the third party one a bit a bit later, but For now, can you speak to the time frame from start to finish? I think you did mention it in your presentation So again when we started the conversation it was December of 2016 and we were awarded the certification in May of 2017 and I think depending on how deep you want to go and how many things that you need to certify or Address in your conformance statement that really depends on you, but for us it seemed like a pretty quick process So six months I would say you know for a company my size Was a pretty reasonable time frame, but I think it can be accelerated Okay, thank you Did you find that you had to did your organization find that you had to create policies in order to meet the requirements The policies were already there. We what we really needed to do was refine some of the processes So there were some gaps in the process that we quickly cleaned up and we're able to feel very comfortable about our certification Does CDWG partner with small businesses to jointly market on government opportunities Requiring OTTPS certifications. Yes, we do. Yes, we do So typically the way we're organized is by Customer set so if you have an opportunity that you are working for a particular customer We would engage you you could engage with the account manager or you can send some you know A question to me and I can direct you in the right Let's see. There's a question What's involved there's some duplicates here Policy question we asked Oh, yeah, has it made has it made a difference To you that this has been recognized as an ISO standard I don't know how best to answer that other than say absolutely Again, it gives us the credibility to sit in front of our government customers and talk to them And they're assured they're comfortable talking to us. That is so important these days That's all the questions we have so you must have oh no, sorry once just come in late breaking news What was the size of the team CDW used for the OTTPS process Literally well, it it takes a village to be quite honest with you, but the primary team actually Completing the conformance statement. It was only three people But those three people touch another 10 to 20 people you you have to talk to everybody within your organization And make sure that everyone understands exactly what we're what we're doing and making sure that they're trained on those kinds of things So the organization as a whole is 8600 people But we've kept but the people completing the certification and going through the process was primarily three people myself included Final question That came in kind of the same time. Did you use an ISO consulting firm to walk you through the process? No, we did not Great. Thank you. Sure. We're gonna leave it there. Thank you very very much for your


Now, I think it's time to work on the safety switch. So these K40 lasers are apparently quite unsafe by design. And you have to help finish them off and make them a little more safe. So if the laser is going and you lift this top up, it'll still keep going. And especially if you have little kids or somebody might be coming through, or you just forget yourself, open it up, get a straight laser beam in the eye, it's no good. So, I ordered some of these micro switches, clicky click. What I'm going to do is wire them into the laser switch, which is that left button there. So that would be the laser on, not laser on, laser off. So the switch will be in the circuit. It will complete the circuit. When the lid is closed, it will break the circuit when the lid is open. So the way that you need to do it is desolder one of the leads to the laser switch, which is that guy, so if we lift this back up. I've already done that, so I desoldered that. Then you've got to go down through this little cable here and start fishing the wire out. Here it is, I'm not done yet, but I'm going to get it out to about here where these other wires are out. And then I'm going to snake it around here, through the back, right there. And then mount my switch here. Now you can drill into the case if you want, but I've seen other people and I don't know if it would fit, so I just took measurements myself and I made a little holder. So that guy will sit on there and then my switch will rest on there and I'll just hot glue it to there and maybe hot glue this to the case. And then when the lid closes, that'll hit the switch and be in business. I may also need to make a little block up here so that the switch will get contacted when the lid closes. But other than that, I think this is good and I'll go and see how it works. Now I've got the switch wired up to my micro switch that will control the door, so go down. I fished it back down through there, it's kind of like sewing, which is interesting.  It's pretty firmly snugly attached. Superbly did the trick. It's clicking and I did have to make a little part that will strike the switch because the lid is too thin to touch right where it needs to. But if you come down and I don't know if you can hear that, I'll get a little closer. So now that'll work. So now my safety switch is installed so the laser will not be able to fire if the lid's open. And I'm sure I can always just press that if I want to live life dangerously. But the default is safe, so that's good.


It's so hard to be here. And amazing at the same time. Hello. You're very good. Hello. Hello. That's so cute. And then when you say how are you, you say Likai. Likai, Likai. And then they will say Retei, Matei. Welcome to J.K.I.M. channel. And here is... Alessandro. The listen that I invite her today is... Alessandro. Black people experience in Korea. Okay, so... Again. So today I'm gonna ask her some questions about experience in Korea as a black woman. Yay. Alessa. Alessa. And it's flower. Flower? Oh my God. It's so sweet for you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so can you introduce yourself, Palessa? Okay guys, so my name is Palessa and my family name is Muchele. I am from South Africa from a very, very small province called Freestate. So yeah, I'm originally from Freestate and then obviously I went to work in Johannesburg. And I'm currently a sanghi, a teacher in Korea. Well, I do many things in Korea but yeah, the main thing is to be a teacher. So when did you come to Korea? I came to Korea last year, February, on the 28th. So that means you have already many experiences in Korea. I have a lot of experiences, a lot. I'm so curious. I can't wait to ask you. Many. Wow, okay. Let's go to the main topic. What kind of stereotypes do Koreans have about black people? I think Koreans have a lot of stereotypes about black people. I think they expect you to act a certain way. I can make example about at my workplace, right? So situations would happen and sometimes I'm a very confrontational person. Like if something is wrong, I won't ask you no more very nicely.  So I just wanted to understand, you know, and I found that a Korean way of doing things is to pretend like they didn't happen, like to not confront the situation. So if I don't confront it, I go home and it sort of like disturbs my mood. So I want to confront it.  Really? Yeah, and I was like, oh my gosh, am I aggressive? And she was like, yeah, they told me you guys are very confrontational. And I was like, no, we actually quite different. You get shy ones, you get talkative ones. So, yeah. It's cheerful, not aggressive. It's cheerful, yeah, yeah, we cheerful guys. We're not aggressive. Oh, that's so rude. It's very rude. Can you tell me more about your experience that you have discriminated in Korea? Well, I wouldn't call it discrimination, so to say. Judgment? Judgment, there's a lot of things. You know, one thing that I've done since I've been to Korea is to try and understand that as people we're different, right? So we perceive things differently. What I might perceive as offensive and discriminative, it might not be on your side.   And some of them will want to take pictures and some of them will, yeah. And some of them will actually ask you questions like, do you know this? And some of them, some of the things I actually don't know, like, do you live with a lion in your yard? And I'm like, no, I've actually never seen a lion in my own two eyes. I'm serious too. Yeah, and they're like, do you have a lion in your yard? I'm like, no, I don't live with lions. So you- I'm not a tiger. I wish I had a tiger. But yeah, so it's not, I wouldn't say it's discriminative. But you do get instances where there's such a- Misunderstanding. Misunderstandings. And you find places that actually they will know, inviting like foreigners into the, like clubs and certain places they know themselves. I would mention. Barrito, I don't know.  So we'll use a different excuse obviously and say, we are full, we have no tables. But of course we do, I don't know the reason. What is this? This is moving. So when I first came to Korea, I had like very, it was pretty long. It was similar to this, but it was very, very long. I've got a lot of stairs. Like a lot of people are like looking at me, staring me down, taking pictures while I'm not watching. I don't know if people actually know, like phones in Korea. They actually have a click sound when you take a picture. So sometimes you will hear like clicks of people actually taking pictures of your hair. And it's very uncomfortable sometimes. I feel like it's very, very uncomfortable to hear someone taking a picture. It's very, it would be nice to say, how can I take a picture? And don't touch my hair. Okay, I will not touch. Don't touch my hair. Okay, so next question is, can you tell me about some experience that you have or your friends have in Korea? How is dating Korean guys? I will start with the good, right? Korean guys are quite amazing guys.  Are you hungry? And all these things, they're quite good on that. So they actually make really good boyfriends. And they do quite a lot of like cute stuff for you. Little bayous, like even small things, flowers and all of that. But with everything, there's also like a bad side of things, which is not all Korean guys, some of them. You do find a whole lot of amazing ones, but some of them, okay? So number one, they will ghost you. So ghosting is you meet someone today and whatever happens, and then you'll never hear from them ever again. Or you'll hear from them when they need whatever they need from you, whether they want to sit for coffee or what. Yeah. And some of them, they don't want to be seen sometimes, walking around with like their girlfriends, especially during the day. I don't know whether they don't want to be judged, but it doesn't happen quite a lot. It does happen, but not a lot. Frozen cards, yeah. Frozen cards. And it's not all of them. There are ones that will walk down the street holding your hands, so it's not everyone. People are different guys. Oh yeah, be careful. Be careful. Guys are for animals. No, exactly. It's not a Korean thing. Every guy can ghost you, actually. I love modern family. Gloria Santa.  Exactly. I want to talk about the beauty standards.  I think for me, I will talk about my own experiences. Since I've been in Korea, I've found that I'm very conscious about myself, wearing makeup almost every single day. My weight, because everybody around me is skinny, so I'm always constantly worried about gaining weight and not actually understanding that our genes are different. Asians are skinny, they're very skinny, and we are like, you know, so you need to work extra hard to be skinny.  And you're just like, yeah, I'm okay, I'm just not wearing makeup. And the treatment is also different. Like when you're wearing makeup, they treat you like you're so important, like you have something important to say. When you don't have makeup, oh my gosh, it's like you're not even there. So yeah, they're quite high because every single person that you meet, they look good. Koreans look amazing, guys. They're beautiful all the time, makeup all the time, skinny all the time. I just don't know how they do it. Like, honestly, I don't know how they do it. Yeah, they care about their appearance a lot. Exactly, like, oh my gosh, it's so hard. Everywhere there's a mirror. Exactly, even at work, I'm just like, what are these mirrors doing at school? Even they bring the mirrors in their bed. Exactly, even if they don't have the mirrors, they will use their phones, like they're always doing this. And I'm just like, oh my word, I can't. Oh, that's true, that's so true. Yeah, I think I should talk about this the next day, another topic. You should, it's so hard to be here and amazing at the same time. We didn't, we're not shooting. So we moved here because the lightsabration was gone, the time was gone, so okay, I can't sure we can use this place or not, but we were using, so yeah. We're basically stealing the time in this room, so I'm very nervous, but we're doing this. Okay, let's just do it quick. Okay. Okay, so next question is, I'm really curious about that. Do you think African black people are treated differently compared to American black people? In Korea? I think not all the time, but it definitely does happen because especially when it comes to teaching, right? I feel like they do prefer Americans over South Africans, especially because it has to do with pronunciation because obviously we do pronounce things differently. South Africans use the British English and obviously they do prefer the American English. So that's where it comes in and in most instances, sometimes when you meet people, they will automatically think that you are American.  I mean, for me, when I see another black person, I can definitely tell when they are South African or not. But when it's a Korean, sometimes they can really differentiate and when they find that you're from South Africa, I tell you, you get a totally different reaction. I don't know how to put it, but it's not as when they received you the first time knowing that you're from America, the minute you're like, I'm from South Africa, it's like, okay. And then America is like, wow, really? Oh, really? Yeah. South Africa. Everyone's thinking... World Cup? Everyone in Korea asks me about Mandela. Mandela died. Oh, he died. He died, guys. He died, okay? So we don't have lions. Mandela died. Sokka, World Cup was in 2010. Okay, so we talked about the experience as a black girl in Korea. And it was really glad to listen to your experience. It was really interesting. And I hope maybe it can be helpful to you if you want to come to Korea or something. Thank you for coming. Thank you so much, guys. Thank you. And she have our own YouTube channel. It's a really interesting tip, so... I'm not really consistent, but you can check it out, okay? Okay, so it was good to see you today. Thank you. Thank you for meeting me. Maybe we can meet another time. Oh, definitely. I will be back. Bye, bye, bye. Bye, guys. Thank you for watching. How to say bye-bye in... Little salante. Little salante.


What's up everybody once again is Brandon Shawn and we got to talk about one of the biggest reason for Eminem's success and placement in the game that nobody really talks about which is story. We're going to show how that worked for Eminem, but then we're going to talk about five things that will help you tell a good story for yourself. So first of all, let's look at Eminem. What am I talking about when I say story really helps solidify his place in the game? Well, alright, when Eminem first came out into the game, he was this white boy, right? And we all know that there was a stigma when it came to being the white rapper at that time, largely due to vanilla ice, even though the Beastie Boys held it down quite a bit, but there had been nobody like Eminem for sure at that point. Lo and behold, he was also the white boy rapper next to Dr. Dre, this superhood thugged out type guy, you've never even seen him next to a white boy before in terms of working with, doing music with, like who is this guy? That already created a sense of story, curiosity, wonderment, all that stuff in the first place. But what I'm really talking about in terms of solidifying Eminem's story is 8 mile. People gloss over the fact that this movie, what it did for his career was solidify him as a legend. It was a film inspired by his real story and in that film, it was an underdog story. It showed a guy who already stuck out because he was a white guy. He was in the hood, he was trying to fit in and he had this dream of becoming an adult rapper in these rap competitions, these freestyle battles. It showed that he was being beat down. He was not great at first and then he overcame, which is the greatest story that is sold again and again and again, the underdog story. Think about that alone. That's the formula for a good movie. When they did this movie, let's mention that for a minute too. They did it quality on a level of any good movie. I would put that not in like, oh, they did that corny little project. That is literally a high quality movie. It did $116 million at the box office. So keep all of that stuff in mind because anytime you see an underdog story happen in real time, it is the stuff of legend, right? You see this with every single artist. When they first come up, they're already an underdog, but when you can see that deep, feel the emotion, feel the story, really connect on that level like eight mile allowed you to do and then say, I'm the real life version of this guy. It's a done deal. It was a wrap. The same thing happened with 50 cent, get rich or die trying. They painted the story, the getting shot nine times, that comeback, that whole mentality. Matter of fact, it's no surprise that 50 cent was on the same record label, right? They realized the power in that formula, the power in that narrative. And a movie was the ultimate way of making you be able to connect with the artist in ways that music doesn't allow you to. You see these situations. You understand where he's coming from. And now when you hear his music, you understand the mentality behind it. You connecting in with it in a totally different way. Without that Eminem would not be seen as undeniable of a great rapper and legend in my opinion. And it's not to say that he's not. It's just the fact that a lot of the consumers, the regular public in the first place, they didn't even think about that style or acknowledged that style as much or what that type of skill set really meant. But people got an appreciation for it through the eight mile movie and they understood it. And what that looked like in the first place and make it an even better clips going around leaking later on where you can see Eminem at the rap Olympics. It's a solidify. Hey, this is the movie. This is kind of like some mini documentary clips that kind of solidify and improve that the movie was true in some aspect. And then of course you have Eminem just being dope and having the music that he had in the first place. So now let's get the five tips, five things to keep in mind when it comes to creating a great story. Number one, great stories are universal. We already kind of touched on this when we talked about the underdog story. How many times do you see the underdog story? There has to be some sort of villain, something to fight against, whether that's establishment, whether that's a goal that you're just roughing and trying to reach or whether that's another person. Love, love is a universal thing. Maybe you are chasing a girl, but there has to be a challenge. There has to be something. So what are you chasing? What are your challenges after you get your initial come up and talk about your past? Now you can switch and figure out what am I chasing? What is bigger than me and how can I communicate that? I've talked about Gary Vee. If you don't know him, he's an entrepreneur, right? Marketer, but he's a very rich guy already. However, people still root for him because he paints this goal of being a billionaire. He's already a millionaire, but he paints a goal of being a billionaire. And even outside of that, he's painting a goal of buying the New York Jets, which still is not necessarily the easiest goal, considering how buying teams works out, which brings me to number two, simplicity. Simplicity is literally one of the most important parts to telling a great story. As creatives, we have so many elements that we want to put into stories with their so many layers and so many details. But when you get wrapped up in all these details and add a side story to a side story to a side story, people lose focus. When people lose focus, it takes a lot of the power out of the story. And on top of that, going back to the Gary Vee scenario, one thing that was very specific and simple is his goal is to buy the New York Jets. It's one thing to just say, billionaire, that's a lot of money, cool. But something as visual and tangible as buying the New York Jets just made the vision stronger for other people to visualize and see happening so that allows people to root even harder. In the same way, seeing Eminem go through this competition. That made it a lot more tangible for people to feel and connect with. And because of that, you root for him greater. So be very specific and very simple and stay in line with that. Now, we've talked about details in terms of not adding too many details to the story, but number three is being detailed in the image that you're painting. Be detailed in the most important parts of the story. When you paint the challenge, let them understand the challenge. When you paint the goal or what it was like, what it felt like to win or what it felt like to struggle, paint those parts of the picture in detail. And number four, appeal to people's deepest emotion, whether that's fear, whether that's a need for success or overcoming obstacles or embarrassment or just comedic value that comes from pain. Whatever these deeper emotions are, if you can find ways to tap into those and make people feel it in one way or another, it's going to make your story far more memorable for one. And that's going to be where they connect as well. Because now that they felt it, they have an experience that they could truly associate. There's been a lot of movies that we've seen. There's been a lot of movies that we've remembered and forgotten on both sides, though. So you can tell your story and even entertain in the moment, but connecting with those deeper emotions will be the things that allows your story to be remembered and create that thing of a legend within whatever your group of people that our fans are.  Do something different. What is outside of what people would expect of you? It's very easy to think about this when you think about social issues. How many times do we have an oppressed group, whether that's women in some kind of way or black people in some kind of way or some kind of race, right? You can always say, all right, the group is going to do their challenges and that can be a thing for them to connect with and tell within their story. But getting more specific, right? More detail painting a stronger picture is not only if I'm a woman, now I'm a woman trying to be the first coach in the NFL or first coach in the NBA. That's a very specific struggle where they're challenging a status quo. They're in a space that's brand new. So as an artist, that could just mean talking about ideas that are different that people wouldn't expect. That could be doing something like even Lil Pump when he said, FJ Cole, how many artists have you said F a lyrical respected artists? It's not from the standpoint of we have legitimate beef, but I don't care about those lyrics that y'all say are dope from a current artist. A lot of people say bump the old school is the new school, but he's a current rapper that is well respected and he's a type of music that people generally say is good music. Lil Pump said, FJ Cole. He could have just said, F lyrical rappers. But once again, for story's sake, more specific, J Cole, that gave a very specific picture, a very specific target.  So with that being said, keep in mind, a lot of these stories don't have to be told in hindsight. Like this was my story. A lot of these stories are being painted in real time. So when you talk about Lil Pump, that's a perfect example. When he said FJ Cole, that created a storyline right there. Young rapper, this type of style says F this type of rapper, but not only this type of rapper, this specific rapper and now the story spreads a lot more. It's something for people to talk about. So it's not always about telling stories for people to imagine and remember, it's creating stories for people to tell. So you can take these elements to create or you can also put these stories out in the world to be documented. And that's it. And for those of you who came to this from the Master Music Branding Guide, I hope it allows the additional context for the rest of what you're about to read. And when I eventually put this up on YouTube, maybe in a few months or something like that, I wanna know what you guys think. Do you know anything? So that's my examples that can relate to the situation. And if you haven't read the Master Music Branding Guide, why? Go ahead, check it out at the link in the description below. And other than that, of course, if you liked this video, go ahead, hit the like button. If you liked it, you might as well share it. And if you're not subscribed, you know what to do. Hit that subscribe.


Okay, we're ready to get started. Thanks everyone for coming. We decided to do a couple of panels in this track, the planning for Drupal Track, because sometimes it's a lot more interesting than maybe listening to just one person for 45 minutes. So we'd really love it if you guys would get involved and ask questions. And we don't really have a very strong agenda. It's really about hearing from you guys and any questions that you have. So today's topic is selling agile, which I think is something a lot of us struggle with because to a lot of us it makes sense, but it's a difficult concept to explain. So we've brought some practitioners of agile to varying degrees along with us. And this isn't at all about kind of, how to do agile or rules or anything like that. It's really just about the language and the kind of strategy around your approach to agile for your organization. So I'm a client service manager for Previous Next in Sydney and we are a Drupal shop. We do only Drupal and we do mostly agile, I think it's fair to say. I have probably a little bit of a different perspective because I've always done projects in an agile way and so it's really actually hard for me to understand the waterfall approach at all because I've seen how successful projects can be using agile. So for me, it just makes sense, but I know that that's certainly not true for everybody. So I'll just have each of you guys introduce yourselves. Hi, I'm Si Hobbs from At The Moment Technocrat. I'm here in my previous capacity as sales support, technical product knowledge and supporting the sales team at Technocrat. I'm not sure if there's anything else I can add to that, I'll pass you on that. Thanks. My name's Snow, I'm from Holly Sydney where I am Chief Problem Solver, I'm told. Which means I do everything. I'm Jason Cochlan, I'm the client service director at Previous Next and unlike Pam, I haven't always done agile. I have done it for a while now but predominantly came from a waterfall background. So I do have a bit of a perspective between the two. So, but as you're probably here today, I'm much more in the agile camp these days. So I guess we can start off a little bit with a little bit of kind of background around how you approach agile, like why do you do it and what are the sort of benefits as you see them? Obviously, before we sell it, we should know why we're selling it. So this is interesting for me to talk about this because I've never been one to push the selling of agile or not agile. I've always been at worked with clients to understand what their outcomes that they want and how to best deliver those. Often I find that agile, mentioning agile with a client simply makes them uncomfortable. They don't understand what it is, they don't understand what I'm trying to sell them. You end up getting into that conversation where they start to perceive agile as being time materials. So in a sense, I think that not talking about agile is quite important in many cases. But by the same token, I'm trying to give the developers who are going to deliver the project the best experience possible and agile is the best way to deliver outcomes to the client. We know that internally and really the question is what can we be doing as far as the contract and to enable us to deliver, a development team to deliver in an agile way? Because the truth is only one out of ten agile projects are really truly agile as well. So I'm really more looking at what's good about agile and how much of that goodness can we introduce into this project? Yeah, I think from my point of view, I think agile is something that is a term that describes the way we've worked mostly for a very long time. And at various points in our past, check into past, we've tried to force ourselves into what at various people have called critical chain project management or other things that really mean that you've got a whole lot of people waiting around for somebody else to finish which has caused problems for us in the past. I think in terms of describing it to the client, I wouldn't necessarily jump in straightaway and say this is agile. I would explain our methodology around multiple tracks moving forward concurrently across interaction design, visual design, feature design and action content. I treat that as an agile track as well and how small components of these four tracks get built or delivered or designed along the way with a lot of hand-holding and meetings and workshops where things are presented and things are discussed and worked out so that as things evolve, I think clients are reasonably receptive to the idea that they don't always know 100% what the outcome is going to be and with a methodology that's more fragmented or fragmented is probably not the right word, staged, so staged approach and then we start talking about sprints and variable length sprints and design reviews and feature reviews and live prototyping and all these sorts of things. And then I can say this is sort of like what people call agile. And actually I've started using some strange words from other domains as well to mean similar things like I'm starting to use the term continuous integration even though it means something else in the tech world. What I'm trying to describe to the client is the process of continually integrating ideas, designs and features and content in an ongoing way throughout the project so that we can respond to change or respond to scope changes or budget changes or timeframe changes without necessarily changing the envelope. So I think, yeah, I would say our processes has been that way and at various times we've tried to change it to make it more strictly one way or another, usually towards waterfall which doesn't really work for me. I would agree completely with Sonos note on that one. I would even avoid, I would completely avoid using the word agile and certainly wouldn't ever launch into talking about frameworks or scrum or sprints or anything to do with the agile methodology or any of the frameworks associated with it. I think what you're doing is actually selling an approach and it's your approach and it's the way that you have determined that working in an agile way works best for you and works best for your clients. So I think working with agile or working in agile way is just, it just makes a lot of sense and there's a lot of things that you can do that are very sensible approaches and I think when you explain those to prospective clients that they will see that sense and it's about building a really high level of trust and a lot of collaboration with the client so that essentially they feel that you're not trying to screw them from the outset and that everybody's really working together to achieve what's the most logical outcome for the project. It's funny, you both said we try not to use the word agile because we don't want to scare them but I think at the end of the day it doesn't matter whether you use the word if someone wants a fixed price, fixed scope contract. I mean that's what we're really talking about here. We're talking about not doing fixed price, fixed scope. So if you're not using the word agile and you're just sort of describing the approach, I mean there would come a point where the client would realize that having said that it's not a TNM arrangement that is what they might think at first. So I've been in pitches where they say, wait a minute, wait a minute. I can't sign a contract with you unless I know exactly what I'm gonna get for exactly how much money. So how do you answer that question in the pitch I'm saying? Well I think you do have to go to some length to explain that the whole idea of fixed price, fixed scope is a complete myth. Anybody who can claim to know all of the needs of a client at the outset and give them an exact price and stick to that is aligning to them. And I think the way to explain that to them is try and engage a little bit about their requirements and look and try and assess quite quickly what their wants are versus their needs and then explain to them how you would be working with them to prioritize those things and actually save them money to get a higher value outcome. There's no reason that you can't provide them with an estimated budget and I think you can still talk about fixed costs but not necessarily fixed scope and then you can work towards a budget that they're comfortable with. Most clients are very uncomfortable giving you a figure if you actually ask them the direct question of how much money have you got to spend and they'll get very cagey about it and if you haven't built up that little trust with them as yet. So you need to be really sticking those conversations to get some sense of what their scope or their project looks like and I think most of us have enough experience to give them a relative estimate of what their budget might look like and that's pretty much what any other organization would be doing even if it was fixed price, fixed scope. The first thing anyone would do would look at a project and say, well I think that's about 150 grand and that's based on experience and generally if you've been around for a while that's probably pretty close to it. So you can do that and provide them a lot of backup information around the actual requirements they've got, give some relative estimations, get them feeling a bit more comfortable about the fact that you've thought through what it is that they're asking you for and talk to them about sticking to a budget. One thing I like to do sometimes is come at it from a little bit from left field and tell them that we actually really don't wanna spend all your money and for us a successful project will be to actually know what your budget is and come in way under that and still to leave you an outcome that is really a successful one and one that everyone's happy with. Yeah, that is certainly a tricky question because everybody does tend to want to know at the end of the day even if they agree with the method they do tend to want to know what they're gonna get and how much it's gonna cost. So the way I think we deal with it is that we do start with a fixed feature set and a fixed budget but we do explain the process that we go through quite clearly and how we handle change. And I think if they know how change is handled up front and how feature in, feature out that sort of process is worked through and if there are ongoing reviews of all of the parts of the project internally and externally and they see that level of care that you're an attention that you're bringing to their project, then that becomes a value in itself and they are more flexible with changes to scope or budget or time. I lost my train of thought there, excuse me. I wanna focus in on one aspect of responding to say a tender or a request for quote and that's the ubiquitous spreadsheet of requirements. There's often a column that asks whether you're going to meet something completely or partially or not at all. I think there's a real tendency to feel like you're in a competitive situation and that if you don't answer yes to all of those questions that your response is kind of compromised. I think if you're dealing with a client that's not willing to look at your responses to each of those questions, you probably don't want that client anyway. Just being brave to look at something and go, that requirement is going to fight against Drupal and saying partial and saying answering partial because it looks like this is not in your best interest. We would like to spend some time to understand what your requirements are further and deliver something along the lines of X1Z. Sure, it does create other complexities with how you size that and you've got a pad for risk and so forth. But when you get into these very fixed requirement tenders, they're all padded for risk. Everyone is quoting over and above what it really would take to deliver that client's outcomes if everyone was doing it in a completely lean or agile way. So I think just being willing to be honest against those requirements and dealing with each of them as an expert and saying that's not in your best interest and just being willing to lose it if the client's not able to understand that approach. I think one of the other big challenges and sort of counterpoints that clients tend to have when it comes to selling agile is it seems like a lot of work for them where I think previously you'd spend six months working on a document, you'd hand the document over to a developer and you'd expect in six months time that you get something back and this idea of kind of a daily meeting and constant questions and I think it's daunting to clients that's a little bit scary. How do you approach that angle? How do you kind of make them feel a little bit better about, you know? Obviously the idea is that the time they put in is time they'll save later and it's worth it but I think the idea that it might be sort of a full-time job for them as well can come as a bit of a shock. I'm gonna take the opportunity to focus on one thing that I think the client loves about agile is the notion of periodic demos two weeks or three weeks. We know that it's at the end of a sprint. We don't, you know, when you're talking to a client you're really saying you are going to be able to see progress every two weeks. The first two weeks you will see some of your website being built.  And so that's where you're really taking advantage of what the good things are about agile.   I'll take your lead and focus on a small part and I'll use content as an example. I think often with the kinds of projects we work on there's a heavy requirement on the content editor. And I think one of the things that I'll say up front to a client is that this is the largest, this is the most underestimated part of the project from your point of view is how long it's gonna take to populate your site or your app or whatever. And that fits really well with our model, which is live prototypes and live websites early on. So content types from a Drupal point of view, content types fleshed out and evolving. And that will also show us what your content's really like, where which fields are missing and all of this. And this will give you a speed up in terms of those scary deadlines that you've placed on yourself and we can make that easier by splitting this up. So you'll get this feature on this date, you'll be able to enter those pieces of content or we can do automatic imports or whatever. You'll get screencasts on how to do that, those just those jobs. So these are also in smaller units, like two minute screencast, how to do this, how to do this, how to do this. And instead of exploding their brain with a manual or an hour long screencast on populating their site or one full day workshop on how to manage your site, they get lots of little ones and that helps us and that helps them. And I think in that way, what was the question again? I've gone off track. Hopefully I'm answering the question. But I think looking at it from their point of view as well. And I think we're really good at explaining how those four tracks, my four tracks, interaction, design, content and function, how all of those running concurrently give them visibility on their project as it evolves, gives them opportunity to change as the project evolves. And from our point of view, it gives us visibility on black holes that we haven't seen, things that we haven't fully understood because they haven't been able to verbalise it or document it. We're just communicating. Everybody wins out of this. And as you pointed out, while we're having our brief, this is not, this tries to also break down the antagonism that can be the client provider relationship. We're not against each other in this project. We're weaving ourselves together and all moving forward together. Well, to answer your question, Pam. Maybe you can tell them the question. Byte's very nature and agile methodology needs to be agile. So I think if you have a client who you're having trouble getting across the line with that sort of approach, then you need to adapt it. So if you're running a scrum framework or using a scrum framework and you have daily stand-ups and you have fortnightly reviews and the client finds that too daunting up front, then you need to adjust it to a point that's comfortable for them. And I think if you bring them along for the ride, you'll find fairly quickly that they start to engage on just very few clients that have ever had that, once they get involved in a project that is running in an agile way, most of them love it and wonder why they've never... If any of you guys have any questions, you can feel free to go up to the mic or if you just want to tweet your question, we'll read them off. One other topic I wanted to talk about was, oftentimes you meet with people who are kind of at the project level and they say, look, I totally buy it. I think agile is great. There's no way my boss is gonna go for it. Is there anything you've found very effective in terms of empowering those people to sell agile inside the organization? I mean, do you have any kind of experience on where you would approach that from and how you would try to drive that change? Are there any resources you recommend or kind of training courses or... I didn't tell this question to them before, so... This one's new. If I was confronted with that situation, I would really seek to have an audience with that person. There's no... I mean, it's a bit of a red flag to start with if the person who's signing off on this is not involved in that conversation. I mean, and it's really interesting that you do often find these really amazing resources on the client side who understand agile, who understand, you know, how to manage the change in a project. You know, they just get it. They're smart. We've had them with a few of our clients and there was one contract that we did which we wanted to deliver in an agile way where we actually wrote as one of the assumptions that a specific staff member wouldn't leave the organization because we were gonna rely on them to handle all of that discussion on the client side and get around change. So, yeah, so that's really... If you can't get that person in the room, you're in trouble, probably. I actually have no answer to this question. Again, I would just say, you know, it's... You've got to have that person at the table. You've got to have the owner of the project and the person who signs the checks at the table. It's got to be about personality. It's got to be about your personality as a business person and their personality as an organisation. And if they don't match, then, yeah, red flags. Um, yeah, Simon's actually absolutely right there. If you really need to talk to that person and get an audience with them, if they're still not budging on that front, then I think you need to find buttons to push and probably usually the biggest one is money. So, if you can somehow cut through on selling in how effective the approach will be and how much money they're likely to save. Very difficult to quantify, I know, sometimes. But you need to find a carrot to dangle to try and get them into a room and actually have a discussion about it. But, like Simon said, if you can't actually speak to that person and they're gonna dig their heels in about it, you're probably in a lot of trouble. Well, you guys are making it sound really easy, so I don't even know why we're here. Anyone can do it, right? No, I'm actually curious though, whether any of you have had the experience where you just tried to go in and sell it and you totally bombed. You either got totally blown off or you said the wrong thing or, I mean, are there any mistakes you've made that you thought, all right, I won't do that again. Whether it's trying to be too specific or making it sound a little bit too much like TNM. Yeah. No, I just wanted to say I've never done anything like that. No, I think the worst mistake you can make is going to be evangelical about agile. And I was probably guilty of that when I first started working on agile projects because it was a bit of a revelation coming from a very strict waterfall background where you are the project management dictator and you're sticking to this budget and scope and nothing will stop you achieving that. And coming to the realisation and digressing a little bit that you engage more with your team and everything is to be working in. But I think, yeah, that would be one mistake that I would have made in the past and that is being evangelical about it and then they just glaze over as soon as you start talking about squam and frameworks and sprints and they don't even have them good. I don't know that I would probably say that I blank out on the stakes. So just forget them, yeah, move on. But I guess maybe having said that and possibly answering your previous question as well about tooling the person on the desk is I think there are some very good visual tools that you can use to describe your process without being evangelical about it, sort of taking again these four tracks, breaking each one down, showing how they all fit together and how they all follow a common pattern. And I don't necessarily think that, I mean, perhaps I have learned from mistakes and been and evolved the way I talk about things, but I think that's just because we evolve the way our projects run. And it hasn't been that we've always had these four tracks and they've all followed these sort of sprint-based patterns but slowly one by one each of these four tracks has become part of this rhythm that you go through. And yeah, mistakes, I don't know, I probably would cover from them hopefully on the fly or get kicked out of the room. I have to ask me next year. Yeah, hi there guys. One of the strategies I've found to be successful is to maybe do a first phase of a project in a fixed price kind of way. Maybe like a pilot thing or stage one or whatever. That could just be some discovery or maybe just getting the thing off the ground. Once you then have that confidence and trust with the client, then you can go on and sort of work in an agile way. Is that something you guys have tried or any comments? Yeah, that's a really, really good point. I think almost every time I've sold a project, I've usually tried to take what is really dark and amorphous about the requirements and push them into a phase two. And I've always found that the client's been really responsive to that approach because, I mean, look, they don't know what's hard about their project. They're willing to believe you provide, I mean, they don't really see the downside of it because all you're saying is, we don't need to quote that. How about we deliver the X, Y, and Z for this amount of money and you can really pull out the stuff, the bread and butter stuff, the stuff that's well-defined that you've done before. You've got someone coming off who's done all that before.  If you go over, it's not by $3 million, it's by $10 grand or whatever. So, definitely do that. Yeah, good point, Murray. We definitely follow that approach too. Sometimes taking it one step further, which is we offer a fixed price one or multi-day discovery phase, which we call a media workshop, where we sell them our time and we say, well, once you've done this, you'll have a document that you can take to Tender or to the next phase. We'd appreciate it if you'd let us quote on that. Include us in the Tender process, because we're keen on this project, we think it's a great idea. Beyond that, often we'll say, okay, we think that there's a piece here that we can do quite quickly and it's quite constrained and reasonably well-defined. Let's call this a prototype or a Stage 1. And yeah, those things that we don't know about yet. Let's, at the end of Stage 1, let's do a whole bunch of user testing.  And I think that goes down really well and that really fits into that prototype Stage 1 type idea where it's, as you say, it's a smaller piece of the job, the pieces are better defined, so it's less likely to go over. And then we've built up the confidence, we've introduced a bunch of tools that they probably have thought about in the past, user testing, unit testing, usability testing, all of that sort of stuff where you can go, okay, well, we can get some data that you don't have. You're making assumptions. We're making assumptions. We don't need to make assumptions. Let's fix it. Yeah, thanks Mario, that is a very good point. I think it's a really good opportunity to take them through that journey I was talking about before and get a really good relationship going with them. We do that, aim to do that on all of our projects and that is like a definition phase at the beginning where we go through and refine their requirements and do that needs versus wants kind of approach to it. And by the time you get to the end of that, they realise that it's not a time and materials project at all, it's not what you're trying to do. You're actually trying to work really closely with them to define exactly what it is that they want and save the money in the process. Yeah, I think the other piece to that and hopefully doesn't happen often, but I think it also gives you an opportunity to assess what type of client they are and if they say they're gonna buy into it and then you find that that's completely not true and they've been difficult to work with, you've only signed on for a discovery phase and you can sort of excuse yourselves after that. So it goes both ways. What's up? You can fire them, that's one way to say it. Dan on Twitter asks, is there an instance where you wouldn't use agile or is it agile or nothing? Like as I said earlier, a lot of the projects that we do in an agile way aren't strictly agile. I think I've only seen one project in my time at Technicrate that was pure agile. So if it's not pure agile, what are you doing? You're really taking the best parts, the ones that can be applied to the project and using them. So even in a waterfall project, I will always try to introduce the idea of delivering two-week demos or sort of working in sprints in the sense that the team has a goal, a short-term goal, where even if the client wants to see an outcome, but it also helps from a morale point of view or internal point of view to minimise risk to have the team all focusing on a short-term outcome. So, yeah, so I think you're still, you're always pulling the parts that just make sense into the project where possible. Yeah, I think it's, I don't think we're sticklers for it. I think it's just really the way it happens under the hood and small projects maybe, you don't really change your methodology, but there aren't really more than one sprint. Or, again, projects are broken up into a couple of stages and they really form one or two sprints each and so it's not so apparent from the outside what's actually going on, or even internally, really. Or the other time that it doesn't really make sense is if we're part of a larger multi-disciplinary cohort of businesses working on isolated parts of a project and then it's not really, doesn't really fit into the category anyway. If it was a multi-million dollar startup with a bottomless pit of money, agile or nothing, because it would just be one big party, but the commercial realities of what we do mean that that is just not at all possible. And actually, I just wanted to reference something that Dan actually mentioned earlier around the project management talk. The agile manifesto, I've seen it also referred to as the half-assed agile manifesto, and that is because if you did take that approach, it would be a very half-assed approach. So if you haven't seen that before, I suggest having a look at it. Everything on the right-hand side that essentially is discounted are absolutely imperative things, and if you don't do them, you're gonna be in a lot of trouble. And a lot of those things are sort of traditional waterfall stuff like contracts and planning. And so, absolutely, what you do is just take the best bits of agile and blend them together so you do sometimes end up with a bit of a hybrid. I think also, it depends what you mean by agile, because I think that when I think of agile, I just mean I'm not giving you a fixed quote, and I think that that's, I think fixed quotes are never a good idea because I think what ends up happening is, as a vendor, we'll add a lot of buffer because we don't actually know. And it may come in way under, well, sorry, it was a fixed quote, you have to pass the full amount. So I think that the kind of, yeah, yeah. So we should, maybe that should be what we do, but I mean I think it's much more fun to interact with the client and say, hmm, you know what, that actually sounds like it might be an eight hour job. Let's say maybe up to 12, but if we get to eight and we still don't think we can do it in 12, we'll let you know, or we'll say, well, we'll spend an hour looking into it and then we'll get back to you with a better estimate. I just think that approach of constant communication and feedback and iteration is so beneficial because I also think that when you say it's not agile and you sort of write a one line requirement and the client has one version of it and you have what you think it is as well. I just don't really see how that will ever end well and I think the idea of, oh, you want a blog, we'll spend four hours setting up a blog for you. Have a look at it, let us know what else you want. Rather than trying to think of anything you might want up front, make sure you get it in writing, make sure you get it in the contract and then that's what you're bound to deliver. I just don't see how that could ever produce a better outcome than let's set it up, try it out and then take it from there. We're almost out of time, does anyone else have a question? Yeah, one. Our business is structured in a way that we have a development design team in-house working with multiple businesses with various needs and we've been making a push towards agile. How would you encourage the business itself to adopt and embrace agile methods when, for example, you say that you don't specifically use the word agile, you use different terminology to describe the workflow and processes within agile without specifically force feeding them agile? When we're being told that we need to be adopting more agile processes, how would you get that type of business who are very, very entrenched in traditional waterfall methods to do that? Who is driving the change in your organization currently? The executive leaders. Although they leave that, I suppose, defining the processes and communicating that to the business. So they've told you to do agile, but nothing more than that? Yes, basically. Anyone? Did you want to respond? I don't know why I was singled out there. Yeah, it's interesting. So the question really is how do we do this, given that we don't have everybody inside the business on board with this experiment? Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? I think, you know, because I tend to be steering the ship, I do spend a fair amount of time trying to explain this methodology to people, even though I'm not a strict... I don't follow a pattern, a strict agile pattern. It's just that our pattern falls into users, a lot of things that agile recommends. And that is a hard discussion to have. I've found particularly visual designers.  Yeah, OK, well, my... OK, and I'll come back to that. If you have your management team telling you to do agile, you're probably 90% of the way there, because that's probably the biggest battle. If it was coming from you to them, that you wanted to do agile, that's a massive uphill battle. So the suggestion would be that you, as the team, need to study and look at agile, get familiar with the concepts and the frameworks and work out if it lines up with the way that you like working and how you want to work. If you don't have people within your team who are kind of self-organising, have kind of leadership potential, I don't mean they have to be managers. They need to be able to lead on what it is that they contribute to the project. If you don't have that, then you're going to fail right from the start. You're just not geared up to be able to do things effectively in that way. So I think there's a quote that I came across when I was preparing for a previous talk, and that is there's a view of this that leaders are absolutely mandatory in an agile environment, and managers are completely optional. I wonder if I just have a couple other ones. I have seen situations where you will sell in a resource, one of your own resources, into a client who effectively spreads culture to use a civilisation analogy. Effectively spreads culture in. You offer your tools.  You can have access to some of our online collaboration tools. That person effectively spreads the culture into the team internally. And so that team, just like when we all first started using IRC to start collaborating with other Drupal people, you get asked, suddenly you've got someone right next to you who's able to go, oh, that problem in Agira, we solve it by doing X, Y and Z. Or this project's doing this and this project's doing that. So rather than being isolated and siloed off, it's a good way if you can possibly get some of the really good agencies to drop a team member in for a couple of months and support your team internally, you will suddenly start to, like, biosmosis a lot of those things will flow in. And so the design question. The design question. And, you know, the four tracks, right? So I think probably design and what I call interaction design has come into this piece nearly, well, I guess maybe content has come in last. But I think going to DrupalCon taught me a lot of these things. All of these Drupal Meetups where you get to listen to a whole lot of smart people talking around front-end ideas. So I think a couple of years ago I listened to Luke Brokker and John Alvin, and John Alvin has done it again today, which was great. So design. Let's split it up. If you want, I can talk about the interaction design piece as well. Design for me now falls into, I wrote it all down, four bits. Four bits. And we use as many of these as we can get past the designer. I think the first thing is, as I was trying to say, they're a little bit upset that they're not going to get to do the whole job. And, you know, they're not going to get to spend, I don't know, I just made up a number, 150 hours. Okay, designers are really expensive, or they think they are. I used to be one, and I was too slow and too fussy and too expensive, so I fired myself. They're not going to, we can't afford to pay them. The client can't afford to pay them to do 20 to 50 Photoshop files that when a change comes in, they have to change them all. And they're good tools for changing all of these files, and I think there's another one I learned about just the other days. Is it called Sketch or something? Who knows what it is? Is it called Sketch? Yes, of course it is. And so I'll be learning that tomorrow. So that's the first conversation. I don't want you to sit down and do this. I can't have it. Oh, but we won't, you know. I can't have it. So the way we're trying to approach it is the first cab off the rank is a, what some people would call a mood board, and I think we would call it style tiles, right? So this is sort of colors, fonts. I say colors, fonts, textures, line styles, and things like this, right? Things that you can fit on an A4 page that will give the client an idea of how we're going to mirror their identity on screen. So you get that right. And this is where the agile thing comes in because we're going backwards and forwards with the client. We're getting all these things right so that when we sit down to do the next bit of work, which may or may not be 50 Photoshop files, we're not wrong. We're not wrong from the get-go. We haven't produced all of these files and they're saying, I don't like it. Once we've got that, then the next thing that we do is design components, which really fits really closely into the way Luke and John Albin have been talking about building design components. So you're isolating components out of the page. And this is where, because we've already kicked off on what we've replaced wireframes with, so because we don't do wireframes, we're doing live prototypes straight into Drupal, and we're showing the design of this. We're saying, okay, well, look there. There's an element. There's a menu. There's a menu and a sidebar. There's a footer. There's a thing.  These are all your components. Go away and design those. And don't design them with other things around them because, you know, you're going to spend a lot of time making the page balance and then the client's going to move them all around and two years down the track, we're going to plop a different kind of panel in there and a different kind of menu in there and you're not going to get your balance. They're going to work by themselves. So design components in an isolated way, reusable components. Right, so on we go and we start building this out in CSS and applying it to the prototype and towards, you know, as time goes on, you know, the clients have been seeing this. They've been seeing the design evolve and Luke Brooker pointed out that this is a good thing for the client as well or rather this is a good thing for the designer and the themeer because the client has seen this all the way along and they've made changes all the way along and they've adjusted things all the way along so they're not shocked when they see the thing, you know, drop, the first drop. And then we have something called the designer's right of review where they get to put on their fancy hat and come in again and jiggle things around. Okay? Fixed amount of time. Yeah, definitely. Definitely a fixed amount of time. Definitely I double whatever they think they might want. And I think this is where CSS preprocessors really come into their own. We've got everything declared in variables and you can sit down and, you know, maybe you've got browser sync installed and you've got the, you know, browsers at three different page widths and you've done all the responsive stuff and they say, oh, I'll just change the pads here and you make a change in the variable and the thing reloads and they go, one more, reload, and using the inspector and just tweaking a few things and reload.  So this gives them a really, really clear jobs, which is style tiles, components, reusable components and then the writer review. And I think that sort of treats them as a designer rather than a draftsperson. I was just thinking for a second about a story that might work. As a business owner I would like a design that changes to my every whim. I think that the other kind of important point there is that a lot of people think, and I think that even we struggle with this sometimes, you think, well, the client's never going to sign off on a design unless they see 15 or 50 templates and the easiest way to answer that is if they want to pay for that, they can, but I think if you put them side by side and you say, you know, you can either pay 20 grand up front for designs that we're going to go backwards and forwards with and probably aren't going to look exactly like that because you're going to change your mind, or you don't have to spend that money up front and we can take the kind of agile you would say the iterative agile design approach, you know, it's going to save you. You know, you can be really clear about the value of that and yeah, I mean, if they choose the template way, I guess, hey, go for it. And you can't click a Photoshop file and everything changes when you can click it, right? And this is what I guess sketch is aiming for, but that's you know, that's the big problem. You can't put where you can actually I was going to say, you can't put a Photoshop file on a mobile phone and discover that your thumb can't get there or it can't hit it or something like that. Whereas if we can get it into the prototype sooner rather than at the last minute when we've realised that the designer didn't design all of the things that we have to build, this is why the live prototyping up front and when I say live prototyping, often I say, okay, in the room with the client, okay, with drew boards built for that, just do it then and there. You want another field? Let's put it in. Where do you want it? Over there, okay. What would you do one on it? Okay, there it is. How does that feel? Okay. One of the things we struggle with a little bit as well is oftentimes we get designs from a third party that have been created without our involvement and I think again it comes down to the cost. We can vote to do the PSD exactly as it looks, Pixel Perfect, everything they've said, including all the features they've invented that don't exist or I can give you the minimum viable product approach that it's less than half the time and we can give you the look and feel and the basics and we'll take it from there and they always pick the one that's at the price so that makes it a little bit easier as well. I think we're out of time but thank you all for coming.


What's up, everybody? Jason from Jaxby's casebreaks.com, a wax party promo break plus two opening day mixture spots given away with this 2016 Optic baseball hobby, one-pack break, random teams number two just sold out. So here we go guys. This is a big break right here. So first we're gonna do the break. We'll randomize the customer names and teams distribute the hits out of the one hobby box. Then at the end of the break, we'll have same dice roll, but two different list randomizes. First one will be for giving away a wax party promo spot. Number one gets a wax party break spot. Have a chance to win a $30,000 NT case. And then the next randomizer list with the same dice roll we'll use is gonna be for the mixer. We're gonna give away two spots. So the top two names get a spot in the baseball mixer. So good. Good luck. Let's do the break first though. Roll it. This is for the break randomizer for the names and teams. Six out of three nine times. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, six, seven, eight, nine, nine, Brian Crouch down to John. Six, three, nine, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Philly's down to the White Sox. So there you go right there, six, nine, nine. All right, so stick to what you got, guys. No trading. I'll let you look at your teams all really quick. I believe Kenta Maeda and Corey Seager were Ricky's this year in 2016, if I remember correctly. So they were like bigger chase-yers here. All right, here we go. Let's do the break. I also want to say Trevor Storey is also Ricky in this. Good luck for it. Well, there we go. Corey Seager. That's still gonna go to the Dodgers, of course, not these in Texas Rangers, though. That's number 141 out of 199. Corey Seager ready to rookie and who has the Dodgers? Terry does. There you go, man. Very nice. Big, big pickup for the Rangers this offseason. Got paid. We got a Chris L. Blue, number to 149. Adam Ian and we, I think I want to say we have a numbered hot box. There's already too many numbered cards already. Brandon Drewery. Yep. Definitely got a numbered hot box. Brian Dozier. It's $199. Jock Peterson for the Dodgers as well. Luis Severino. Wow, is that a gold vinyl? Or was I just tripping on? Matt Kemp, San Diego Padres. Prince Fielder. Corey Seager. Wow, out of ten Mookie Beds gold. That's a pretty nice hit. Optic autographs. That's a gold five out of ten Mookie Beds. And of course, that's gonna go to Boston. Boston, that's David or Barry David, I should say. Damn. That's a nice hit right there. What a great box. Jesus. Hot box and a great autograph. Zach Granky. Jose Bautista. We have Billy Burns and another gold, Andrew McCutcheon. Two out of ten. Jesus. What a box. Miguel Cabrera. Back to the future, Adrian Beltry. Number 299. Max Kepler. Jose Paraza. Justin Upton. And Tom Murphy, black raided rookie. Which is out of 25. Trevor Stoyer refractor rookie. Kettle Marte, little color match there for the Seattle Mariners. Kintzmaeater raider rookie. And Alex Dickerson autograph there for the San Diego Padres. What a box. Chris Davis. Color. Eric Hosmer. And we got John Kowski. Travis John Kowski. Very nice. Jesus. That was a box, alright. So there you go. Hot box with all the 20 different parallels. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 over here with the Corey Seeger. And then you have 20 with the gold. And then Mookie Betts gold autograph as well. So very, very nice right there. Alright, solid right there. Alrighty. Now let's switch jeans guys. And let's do the giveaway. So again, first randomizer with the same dice roll for both will be for the wax party. Number one, get to wax party promo spot. The second randomizer will be top two, get an opening day mixer spot. Alright. So let's roll the dice. Same dice roll for both lists. It's 11 times, six and a five, 11. So the first one will be for the wax party guys. Good luck. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, and 11th and final time. 11 times. Good luck. 29 sad people. One happy person on this randomizer. Sorry, DeCons. And Martin straight up. Look at that. Boom. Congratulations, buddy. You are now in the wax, excuse me, wax party now. So let's put you right here. I think Joe did an optic already for this two as well. Ah, so congrats Martin. So again, that was 11. Now top two now in this list randomizer, after 11 times, get opening day mixer spots. Good luck. Top two. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, and 11. 11 times now. There we go guys. Top two this time. Top two. So this time 28 sad people and number three. No, don't, Michael actually, I think you just got a spot on the last one. So I guess I will feel so bad, but you never know. I guess he's still gonna be in the top two. And congrats to Barry David and Nicholas. Last spot mojo. The brother is getting in. Damn. There you go. Sheesh. That's crazy. 11 times. There you go. So now let's put both of you guys into the 70 box here. All right. And then what did Joe do you use for this one? Optic one. We'll copy and paste this. This will be up two. I didn't get your brother in on this one, but I got your brother in on the first one earlier today. So there you go guys. Like I said, all we have to do is sell the RMB, which is six out of 10 left, top chrome black, which is seven out of 10 spots left. And then one full spot if anybody wants to buy that full spot guys. So congrats everybody. If you guys want to give it another shot, we have, like I said, a couple more left, six left and six left now. So one left, six, six, six left. If you guys want to sell it out tonight, let's do it. JaspeasKageRich.com.