Je pense qu'on peut commencer, donc merci d'être ici. Mon nom est Mathieu Groh, je suis le CEO de Actancy, mais nous allons l'introduire en plus tard. Tout d'abord, l'objectif de cette présentation est de vous donner les clés de notre méthodologie que nous avons créé durant les 7 dernières années et qui sont dédiés aux accounts key. Et surtout, nous allons répondre à la question de comment s'assurer que l'on fasse de l'argent dans notre organisation. Donc, comme vous pouvez le voir, j'ai un accent frère, donc c'est pour ça que Yolaine parle beaucoup et je vais m'aider. Mais vous devez le voir, c'est mon bon accent plus tard. Yolaine. Merci. Bonjour tout le monde. Mon voix est un peu brûlée, j'espère qu'on va pouvoir le faire jusqu'à la fin. Nous allons d'abord parler des misconceptions les plus commones que vous pouvez trouver par rapport à tout ce qu'il y a à faire avec le projet de management. En général, c'est important que vous soyez habitués à ça. Comme Mathieu a dit, nous allons l'introduire rapidement. Et puis, nous allons entrer dans le détail de l'organisation que nous avons trouvé qui a pu travailler dans nos projets pour des grands accounts de key, donc le focus sera sur ce genre de projet plus spécifiquement. Et puis, nous allons aller à la stratégie planée que nous avons implementée avant de concluter cette session. Bonne journée. Ok, je commence. J'ai voulu commencer avec cette étude publiée trois mois plus tard par le groupe de standard et nous avons découvert que la grande partie des projets n'est jamais accomplie. Et cette charte montre la vraie probabilité de succès au projet IT. 52 % sont complétés, mais avec un grand accès au budget et au délai. Finalement, seulement 16 % sont correctement achievés si on s'occupe d'une grande compagnie, seulement 9 %. Donc, il y a un problème dans notre profession, spécialement pour le management des accounts de key. Dans ma opinion, l'agency est trop concentré sur les skills, c'est important, mais il ne garantit pas d'avoir une meilleure probabilité. Et nous devons être conscients que l'accès de key à l'accès connaît cette probabilité. Donc, ils doivent entendre que vous êtes habitués à manager une méthodologie forte. C'est pourquoi nous avons créé cette présentation. Donc, pour commencer avec les misconceptions que vous entendez le plus souvent, cette diagramme vous montre que un projet de vie est généralement divisé dans deux sites. C'est un peu comme le monde et les gens. C'est le plus bas, et le plus bas. Comme nous le savons, pour ceux qui ont travaillé sur les projets, ou même pour vous, les clients, si il y a certains de vous, tout commence bien quand vous commencez un projet. Les gens sont peut-être sceptiques au début, mais ils sont plus égaux et plus égaux et fantastiques pour commencer le projet. Mais le projet fait du temps. Les gens ne voient pas les résultats immédiatement. Il y a beaucoup d'involvements. Et parfois, les gens font des questions sur ce qu'ils font et ce qu'ils font. S'il vous arrive un point dans votre projet quand vous commencez un tract de votre timeline. Et c'est quand votre organisation commence à souffrir, parce que la solution que la plupart des organisations ont fait, c'est généralement d'asker les gens à travailler les jours et les nights et les week-ends, à manger les pizzas devant leurs compétences, pour faire le travail au final de leur projet. Mais, après beaucoup de travail, beaucoup de hard work, quand les gens ont parfois été combattus, vous pouvez voir les résultats de votre projet. Le temps de beer n'est pas si loin, donc les gens sont plus heureux. Mais, vous n'avez pas que 1 beer, parce que vous avez réveillé et que vous avez reçu de l'argent. Donc, nous avons demandé comment évoquer cela. Finalement, c'est notre probabilité de succès d'aujourd'hui. Donc, notre goal est d'augmenter votre propre probabilité de succès. Et, s'il vous plaît, nous continuons à tourner nos méthodologies depuis 7 ans. Donc, ce n'est jamais fini et nous pouvons continuer à discuter d'aujourd'hui. Nous allons faire des promesses qui vont vous sembler une grande promesse, mais c'est en fait ce que nous sentons en parlant et en partagant aujourd'hui. C'est que, sur un grand quiocan et de n'importe quel projet en général, avec Drupal, vous pouvez avoir plaisir en travaillant. Vous pouvez continuer à délivrer une qualité dans les lois tight, afin de éviter la bankruptcy, parce que c'est ce qu'on est tous en train de regarder. Donc, comment nous allons faire ça ? Tout d'abord, nous allons introduire nous-mêmes rapidement. C'est vrai ? Oui, donc, comme je l'ai dit, je suis le fondateur et le CEO d'Actancy, donc je suis Young, enthousiastome Drupal, et mon rôle opérationnel est d'être le direct direct de Drupal. Et c'est pourquoi c'est une bonne chose qu'on présente ensemble cette méthodologie. Bien sûr. Je suis Violène et je suis ce qu'on appelle le project fonctionnel. Je vais revenir à ça plus tard, parce que nous faisons une différence entre un techniciel PM et un fonctionnel qui je suis. 28, même plus jeune. Et je peux maintenant dire que comme project manager, Drupal a sauvé ma vie. J'ai été management des projets pour les derniers 7 ans maintenant et plus spécifiquement sur Drupal depuis deux ans maintenant. Le moyen de travailler avec Drupal est vraiment différent et il fait les choses plus facile pour le project manager que je vais vous montrer aujourd'hui. Ce que j'ai écrit ici me semble important que je suis un grand projet spécialiste. C'est juste que j'ai commencé 7 ans auparavant avec des projets plus spécifiques que les projets que je ménage maintenant, ce qui ne veut pas que c'est plus facile de ménager.  C'est la picture de notre organisation. Ce n'est pas... Le but ici n'est pas de vous montrer comment on s'est organisé ou qui nous sommes exactement. Mais vous pouvez prendre votre propre picture et c'est un autre misconception que nous avons généralement quand nous parlons de projet management, c'est que nous pouvons trouver un client avec une petite précision qui est en termes de workload un projet qui est estimé à plus d'un millon d'euros. Donc ça commence à être un projet important. Et dans ce monde pour nos clients internet c'est facile et facile et c'est even fun. Le projet de management c'est une pièce de cake. Mais ils ont toujours des lignes très courtes. Ils ont toujours des choses très demandées. Donc la première chose à prendre la pression est mon bus N plus 1 qui est près de moi. Ce que nous pouvons avoir dans les organisations classiques c'est que normalement quand la pression vient du client c'est qu'il s'agit d'un projet de management. Je suis devenu une sorte de malin et je spreading la pression par l'organisation. Et c'est vraiment ce que nous voulons évoquer. Donc nous avons travaillé pour les dernières années sur une méthodologie pour trouver des solutions pour que nous pouvons évoquer la majorité du projet pour être la seule à prendre la pression et à la spreading pour que nous puissions avoir des ennemis. Donc après ces dernières années c'est ce que nous avons un peu de l'amour et de la magie. C'est pas si merveilleux. Plus sérieusement nous avons pensé d'une organisation parce que vous ne pouvez pas établir une bonne méthodologie sans penser sur comment réunir vos gens tous ensemble. Dans un groupe vous devez savoir on peut déjà savoir que nous l'avons identifié plus que ça. Mais nous l'avons compté de 18 à 20 différents profils qui peuvent être réalisés par une équipe du Drupal. Vous avez probablement déjà entendu d'un projet technique un développeur un architecte du Drupal un administrateur système des constructeurs etc. Comment choisissez-vous qui sont-ils ? Nous avons travaillé ensemble et vous ne devriez pas oublier que sur ces types de projets en front de ces 18 à 20 profils vous avez pas seulement une personne vous trouvez une personne qui est le project manager sur votre client-side mais il est entouré avec parfois 10 à 12 différents équipes vous pouvez entendre parfois des équipes de business, de hosting d'organisation, du client-side du client-side etc. Donc, souvenez-vous 18 à 20 différents profils en face de 10 à 12 différents équipes Comment vous faites ces personnes travailler ensemble qui devraient en parler avec qui ? Et sans avoir un grand malade. Donc, c'est pourquoi nous avons commencé à penser comment vous synchronisez ces personnes-là ensemble pour que vous puissiez atteindre un objectif qui est votre timeline du budget et du scope parce que les plus de gens, les plus de l'argent d'habitude, et c'est faux, nous allons vous présenter. Vous commencez d'organiser votre équipe de client-side donc ça commence avec une équipe de purchasing de hosting, de hosting, de marketing, de content owner, de business team, sur les autres côtés, sur lesquels ils sont allés par leur directeur de sales. Là, vous voulez mettre bien sûr, le comité de management project qui est organisé avec le project manager sur le client-side qui va évidemment communiquer avec le SPOC, qui est un autre de mes names. Je suis un seul point de contact, mais je ne suis pas le seul. C'est juste que je suis la principale chaîne de communication dans laquelle le client va passer si il ou elle veut travailler avec le reste de nos experts. Et bien sûr, cet équipe est sur le project directeur. Je ne suis pas seul là-bas. Je travaille avec le premier état de protection et j'utilise la protection et je vais retourner à ce concept plus tard. Je travaille avec ce qu'on appelle le comité de management un CTO et un CMO ou directeur créatif. Et sous le CMO vous trouverez l'architecte d'information qui lui-même va coordonner le travail de web-designants et de thèmes. L'architecte d'information est un de les profiles les plus importants que vous avez dans votre équipe. Mettez ça en main et pourquoi est-ce que ça? Parce que je ne sais pas si vous voyez la couleur de l'arrivée entre le project directeur et l'architecte d'information. Mais ces deux profiles différents votre travail est un project directeur qui va s'assurer que ces deux gens aillent beaucoup avec eux et qu'ils travaillent tous les jours dans votre projet. C'est fundamental si vous voulez avoir du succès dans votre projet. Sous le project directeur qui lui-même est assuré par le comité de management et le CTO vous trouverez l'architecte, l'administration du système et les développeurs de front-end, de back-end et de builders. Je ne sais pas si c'est très clair si vous êtes dans le back-end. Excusez-moi? Vous voulez me définir le comité de management? Le comité de management est celui qui va planir mais pas seulement ça, il n'y a pas seulement un planer le team technique il va être celui qui va faire sure que le whole team technique est commis pour différents tasks qu'ils ont à faire. Je vais retourner au comité principal après ça. Mais prenez en compte qu'il est un safeguard pour le projet de management fonctionnel et pour le projet de management technique aussi. Est-ce que ça va être un peu plus clair? Oui. Une autre façon pour le mettre, si c'est peut-être plus visual, plus understandable c'est ce qu'on appelle le cercle virtuel. C'est ce que cette gouvernance nous a aidés à faire. Comme je l'ai dit avant, la plus importante team est là. Le diagramme que vous avez vu c'est vraiment un diagramme de gouvernance. Ce n'est pas un diagramme hierarchique, c'est un diagramme de communication. Bien évidemment c'est la plus importante team et les gens sont là. Tout le monde est important dans la team mais sans la team courte il n'y a pas de projet. Il n'y a pas de production. Et là je parle de les devs, les architectes, les développeurs, les constructeurs et les constructeurs. Évidemment, vous voulez qu'ils travaillent dans un environnement calme et safe. Comment faites-vous ça? C'est pourquoi je vais retourner au concept de la protection de la team courte. Vous avez ce profil que nous avons entendu avant. Qui est le premier guide de protection? Qui est le manager du projet technique? Il est le seul qui communique directement avec la team courte. Et c'est vraiment important parce que vous voulez éviter la team courte d'être déterminée par les emails et trop de communication pour aider le manager du projet technique dans la team courte. Vous avez ce que nous appelons le shield. Et le shield est fait de différents profils que nous avons vu avant. Vous avez le directeur du projet, le manager fonctionnel, le manager committement, le CTO. Les différents arrows dans lesquels ils représentent que tout le monde a un safeguard dans un projet. Personne n'est déterminé dans l'organisation. C'est-à-dire que le directeur du projet est là pour s'assurer que le manager fonctionnel ne rencontre aucun problème avec les clients ou la team courte. Le manager du projet technique est là pour envoyer des messages warnés pour le manager committement, pour le CTO, quand il a besoin d'aide technique sur la stratégie, quand il a besoin de plus de ressources, il va au manager committement, quand il a un problème avec le déti de Redet 9, il vient de moi et on va essayer de trouver des solutions, ensemble. De cette façon, le soutien mutual est promos dans tous les membres de la team mais aussi pour l'efficacité, d'ailleurs. C'est aussi une organisation qui m'emmène d'actuellement aller sur les holidays de temps en temps, sans avoir peur d'être transformé en un bonhomme quand je reviens. C'est vrai que c'est vrai, parce que j'étais en train de faire un projet, la whole team continued working. C'est pas qu'ils n'aient pas besoin de m'aide mais il y a plusieurs profils qui ont took my part during the summer and it all went well in the end. Once you set up this organisation and made it work you can actually add another project manager. It's just a diagram that's going to be repeating over and over again as long as you make sure that this governance that we saw before and that the virtuous circle is working well. So you really need to make sure that people and that's the basis of everything that people really do communicate well with each other, that the warning messages really do come and get through the core team through the technical project manager through the last layer of the shield. As a conclusion of this slide we can say that the core team this is the team that has the power because you trust your experts and you're not going to doubt their workload estimations, their expertise but it only works if you actually enable them to have this power so if you empower them if they were able to commit themselves to such workload estimation it doesn't work one without the other. To make it clear we're going to enter some planning strategy phase. There you can see we divided the project life cycle into seven different steps. So again we are not there today to teach you any new revolutionary method or whatsoever but really basically to say that we found solutions that have been working and there might be more steps than these seven there but for us it's really the most important phases that you can find. So we go from the purchasing to the implementation inception phase functional technical conception and then production and testing strategy until the end. I won't go into the details of the phases that you see which are the recurring phases on the left. Those are weekly meetings and monthly steering committees that you can put in place. This is not going to be what I'll be talking about today nor on the right side of the trunk. So Mathieu will be introducing the first step because it's more his expertise in a project which is then the purchasing phase. Just because I have also the responsibility to sell the big projects to key accounts. So I consider that the purchasing phase is the first step of the project. You give the keys to the project manager. So I recommend to respect some important points. First phase is to provide a business case to your client. So that's a pre-sales phase. This business case is just a document containing all the main aspects of your organization de preference, de methodology, etc. And it's very important to include a TOC. A TOC, Total Honor Cost is an addition of all the cost of your project on two years. Hosting maintenance license, if you want to compare with another technology and that's very important. By instance this year we make the comparison between Oracle and Drupal and we make the demonstration to a client that he could save until 40% of his budget on two years by choosing Drupal instead of Oracle. So this document is very good for Drupal. But after that there are POC proof of concept phase so Drupal has a lot of standard modules so it's easy to demonstrate out of the box functionalities and key accounts love that but you have after that to forecast your provisional budget. And there is an issue there it's not possible to manage all the variables at this step you don't know a lot of things you have to organize workshops so you have to be optimistic at this step and to write all the constraints in the contract so in the SOW and this constraints list is the keys that you provide to your project manager this is the most important point in this slide to remember and after that of course you have to wait the purchase order so but it's important to write in the contract all the constraints and after that the project manager can take the project so at this point as much you just said you don't have much when you start such a project as a project manager you only have 3 keys to play with the project the second one being the list of your clients constraints and you've got an implementation architecture what are you going to do with that and how are you going to play with that well your goal is to identify all the variables that you will be able to work with and for every single of these variables define a solutions find all the alternatives to be able to offer to your clients and in the end be able to confirm or sometimes unfortunately maybe for the client update the budget because I don't know if you really got it but at this point after the purchasing phase it's such a huge project that there are lots of things that were impossible to anticipate and to estimate so the goal there you're going to have to enter 2 validation tunnels the first one being the marketing workshops and there you'll be talking about site map content types volume of data regarding the marketing site that could have some impact on your planning or on your budget or on your scope second validation tunnel is the IT workshops you're the same we'll be talking with the client's teams about SSO adapte connection performance network third part integration system API and so on all these topics can have a major impact on both your scope of course budget then and as a matter of fact planning once this is done when you're able to start setting up a good project governance and organization by planning the weekly meetings and tools and so on but most specifically this is exactly the moment when you know how you will have to arbitrate with your client on what's going to be what will take part of your scope and what will have to be out of your scope once this is done and the road is a little bit clearer you're entering the functional conception phase the most important thing and really I'm insisting on this point is to have the internal kickoff before going to your client because this is the first time in the project when you'll be talking directly with your experts the information architect, the CTO the technical project manager these people will be able to tell you what you should be negotiating in terms of planning with your clients what package of development is more interesting to launch before another one and they will bring points of attentions to you that you hadn't seen maybe before and it's very important all this you're going to be talking about with your client during the client kickoff and there you start as an iterative so this is how we work you give your the project manager gives the information architect kind of a smart route plan which is for every single workshop a detailed scope of what the information architect should be working on with his clients of course this is exactly when you should be encouraging both of them, client and information architect to use full standard Drupal functionalities maximum and then you enter the cycle what's important to notice there is that the workshops will enable the information architect to start talking to the technical project manager so this is when these two actually meet and never leave each other until the end of the project this cycle here is very efficient in terms of how to detect any scope changes it allows you not to wait till the last minute of the conception phase to notice that the client has been requiring a lot of things that were actually not included in the scope you can detect these requirements after every single workshop because once the information architect goes out of a workshop he talks with you and he talks with the technical project manager making sure that everything was first included within the scope and is going to be feasible technically using full standard Drupal applications if not, if something comes out of the scope then it's early enough for you to go to your client and start arbitrating and say well, if you want this it's going to require maybe un scope or maybe an additional budget and deadline so yeah, this is what you should keep in mind always try to push out of the box modules and remember that actually 90% of a project could be created with standard modules going custom is not a necessity always so as I said before in parallel of the functional strategy your technical project manager already starts working so that at the same time as your information architect is writing the functional specifications you've got the technical pair who's writing in the technical strategy and technical specifications too so that when you arrive at the end, at the steering committee with your clients the point of validating wireframes ready design ready, functional and technical specifications done keep in mind that at this point when you validated the specifications on both sides any single modification implies a negotiation on the scope or on the budget the advantage with Drupal is that even if you've got some issues because the solution that you imagine first will take too much time or is too expensive whatsoever there are several ways to reach the same goal with Drupal so it's also up to you to challenge your experts and try to make them find other alternatives and then offer them to your client another good thing to keep in mind at this point is that you can have and we really do recommend to get your specifications validated by Acquia why should you do that because you want to get some kind of credits and quality label on your specifications so that you will avoid any potential judgements from your client once the project reach not a crisis point but some difficult phase so don't rest too soon because you just got started you might think that it's an exception phase a really detailed kind of detailed purchasing phase then an exception phase with architects with technical project managers we talked about CTOs I mean that's a lot of people involved right but it's not the end of your problems because you're gonna meet what we called the project manager I mean the first there are like kind of two biggest enemies to avoid but please meet the ostrich everybody is familiar with what we call the ostrich effect or not no well it's pretty simple it's like when you bury your head into the sand for many reasons there are many reasons for that what are they actually because you're of good will it's not that you don't want to see the problem is that you're not denying that there's a problem but you wanna do so well that you will make sure that anytime in any situation you will manage to to handle them to fix every problem that you have the second reason for the ostrich effect is the fear I mean the most organizations people are afraid of pressure or judgment so they tend to deny the problems right they hide it under the carpet and third reason for that is actually self confidence because well you think about that problem but you're like well yeah it's fine I mean I know how to take care of that and it's okay it's like a retarding bomb as a project manager you're facing the ostrich effect every single day and it comes from every single of your team members it's not their fault keep on loving them but it's a very it's a very very hard enemy to fight how do you fight it actually well first by trusting the expert the expert knows better than you I mean you are not as a functional project manager you're not a Drupal architect you're not a site builder you're not an information architect second solution for that is to never take it's fine I'll take care of that I'll fix this as an answer because it's not a good answer so instead look for pragmatic answers how do you do that well just ask pragmatic questions such as did you have did you receive written specifications have you read them did you list all the tasks that were yours to realize and complete did you actually estimate the workload for every single of these tasks that you will have to complete and so on once you've got all these answers from the expert you're like alright well you said that this task is gonna take you ten days I trust you with that but then do you commit yourself that it's really a safe workload estimation and this is when the commitment starts so I give you the power to say that and I'm not gonna doubt that this task is really gonna take you ten days but then don't mess up with me and don't make it fifteen days and commit yourself so that's the empowerment situation a fun fact or maybe not depending it's that based on our statistics unfortunately the ostrich effect actually doubled the budget and to three projects that we had it was really tremendous effect so learn how to identify the ostrich and then kill them all alright now that you know who your enemy is you can enter safely the production strategy phase it's the same way as the functional conception phase this phase will be iterative right so if you know the scrum methodology it's pretty similar because we will be able as soon as one functional package is validated and we've went to the end of it we'll be able to launch a package of development the matching one of course so you wanna make sure that your technical project manager first issues a really detailed route plan for every of the developers who are gonna be working on this package of development you wanna be looking for the commitments before starting anything don't wait until like half of the developments are done before wondering well if I asked them if they were actually sure that the development would take 10 days because then you're in danger so ask for the commitment before starting but no worries for the developers if they are in the room I know they are my colleagues but I don't know about you others you can still cancel and that's the magic of this organization is that you can still cancel a commitment I mean everyone is allowed to make a mistake to get wrong with an estimation it's really a hard task to estimate a workload precisely the only golden rule there to remember is that cancel your commitment halfway don't wait for the sake of the project manager don't wait until the end like the last minute to cancel your commitment because then it provokes a huge crisis obviously don't wait for the day before the delivery to say that you're not gonna be able to make it a good thing to remember is that this is the time this is the exact time when you should be creating your test plans because you will have to kind of educate your client to the idea that the test plans will be replacing at this steps the specifications that you validated cause test plans there are those scenarios that will enable your client and yourself to check and make sure that everything that was validated before was implemented and works well so the test plans at this point really become your referential and they replace the specifications keep that in mind for the the end of the cycle but don't run away too fast because you are not done yet almost it's long project life cycle takes long you're entering the testing strategy phase there are two sub phases in the testing strategy phase first the internal strategy the internal testing and then the external testing obviously you won't be delivering a project that hasn't been tested and validated before to your client this is when your second biggest enemy as a project manager and as a whole team comes up they are the regressions it's very important to not deny them because they exist and you have to work with them so this cycle is pretty simple you created the test plans before so now you're going to execute all the tests and then the functional project manager which I am will be qualifying every of these tickets giving them priorities and maybe identifying some tickets as evolutions or as real box to correct the technical project manager then will be estimating the workload for every single ticket that was created which is very important because then of course the core team will be resolving and testing again the tickets but the workload estimation is very important for your technical project manager to be able to issue everyday a report for which we will see an example of it later on but this report will tell you exactly how many tickets were created the workload that was estimated to treat all these tickets all together and this is when the technical project manager will be asking the commitment manager and the functional project manager to add more people because the workload estimation was actually too important or it doesn't happen so often unfortunately but it can ask for the bandwidth what we call the bandwidths how many people can treat how much workload to be reduced it becomes then it's in the hands of the commitment manager to either reinforce the bandwidths or reduce it reducing it is is not always easy for him but it's actually a little easier still than reinforcing it because when you arrive from one day to another to your commitment manager with kind of a crisis situation requiring 15 more people and you want them in the morning then you're pretty sure he's going to spend a good night but it's not your problem anymore that's also what you realize that thanks to Drupal it makes it easy to involve big teams from one day to another because the only problem that the commitment manager has to do then is to find the people but apart from that you can really add and I'm not kidding that's what we've been doing sometimes it happens that we needed from one day from one week to another a bunch of 10 more guys to respect our deadlines but be able to treat all the workload he was able to do that so it's good for him to have a communication on your ticket then you can involve builders, themers Drupal architects on more complex architectures and so on and have them all work together without disturbing the global project so this is an example of the report that our technical project managers can give us every day as soon as you start entering the testing phase what you want to require from your team from your technical project manager this is the only way that you can control what's going on and that you can make sure that you will be delivering a project on time why is that because I don't know if you see that well but in the first column there you have the bandwidth so that's pretty much how many people how many people were planned so far so as an example I took the date of the 17th of September on a project that we were testing we had 14 hours that were planned so it's two mandates we had two people available by then we had a number of 22 tickets left to complain sorry the workload was estimated to 25 hours so in other terms we couldn't make it when this happened the technical project manager the commitment manager and I we met had a nice chat and I asked the commitment manager to provide double the time that was actually estimated and that's our recommendation because when you have 25 hours estimated on tickets that are already created don't forget about your second biggest enemy which are regressions you wanna make sure that you'll have enough time to treat them all then for this example you'll be planning 50 hours so he had another quiet evening then when I asked him to find so many people from one day to another because we hadn't planned the project would extend further than the 20th of September it was a piece of cake once this is done I mean you're almost done but now you're gonna deliver the project finally to your clients and that's a dangerous road I'm not gonna go into details through the cycle again because that's what we've just talked about but I wanna point out the two the two things that I've added above and below the cycle diagram as soon as you enter the external testing phase you should be sending your client a validation report this is the little paper magic paper that you wanna get at the end of your project saying well alright good job you're done, the project's on I'm the client and I'm signing it how do you do that well if you send it to your client in the middle of the testing phase which is a time when the pressure can be pretty intense on both sides it's really not likely that you're gonna get it easily but if you send it to your client at the beginning of the testing phase it prepares him psychologically to the fact that at some point it's gonna end and he's gonna have to send you a report and that it's still gonna be possible for him to list all the things that are still to be corrected even if he signs up the paper and because he has a deadline and the project has to go online in the end you can reassure him and say well at this point that your client will be on his own after the project is online you can still list all the things that you want to have corrected and that's fine it's also very important because this validation report will put will put your client in a position when he also has to get into such a commitment your client has a responsibility in doing so the first one is to promise you that he's gonna execute his tests by respecting two things the validated specifications on one side and the test plans this is how you can make sure that you can keep being efficient during the testing phase and that you're not gonna be debating over problems that are not even problems because you can't be a person in your specifications so this is kind of a rule to respect and second is that he's gonna put him in a position that he will know that from the moment when he signs on the paper any new ticket that hadn't been created before so any problem that hasn't been identified before that will become an evolution so there won't be any correction but you can make sure that the project has a real end so at last but not least if there are three things that you can keep in mind for your project three things that you want to guarantee on your project is the production speed how do you guarantee that well thanks to your technical project manager working together with the CTO on the technical strategy so you want to make sure these two people work together budget and scope thanks to the project manager and project director there are the safeguards on this part and the bandwidth which is the commitment manager's job problem knife so it's thanks to these profiles the different layers of protection that we've been talking about before that you can ensure that your team will work in a safe and quiet environment they won't be polluted by external communication that they don't have to deal with and that you meet your objectives and deadline on time a lot to say on the methodology so we have to to end it took 7 ans to come up with this methodology but it still continuously improving so it's good to know that it increased by 5 our success rate since the beginning and it took 3 years to reach this goal become cost efficient because it was not the case at the beginning clearly we are cost efficient since 4 years thanks to that and to be able to manage the crisis and to keep a fun atmosphere that's maybe the most complicated goals to reach so I hope you can pick something for your own methodology it's done we explain a lot of things and I hope it could be helpful for you and thank you for your patience now if you've got some questions I think we still have time I don't know what time it is actually but we might still have yeah first of all I hope the commitment manager had time to come here is right behind you actually respect to you man yeah give him a big applause thanks for the insight it's very valuable one thing I wanted to know if you hear around here on the floor everybody's talking about Agile and Scrum and all of these more iterative approaches which you clearly are in a waterfall approach is that a particular choice you made I'm not sure I got it so that we didn't go 100% Scrum or why why didn't we go there what are the reasons that you don't adopt a Scrum Scrum methodology that's a good question actually because we noticed that major key accounts our clients are not I'm not really ready I mean that's the reality we understand the benefits of the Scrum methodology but our clients it's still hard on such major key account projects like more than 1000 main days they the most recent example came up like 3 weeks ago it took us 2-3 months to actually get what Matthew called the PO the purchase order because we were talking about a forecast budget a forecast planning so there was not anything was not fixed or so in that way it's pretty similar to the Scrum methodology but as long as they could not have the written and fixed promise that we would keep this budget we would keep this planning they wouldn't have they wouldn't have let us start with a project and it's hard for them to it's still hard for them to to to be convinced that the Scrum methodology is actually a good one so you have to commit somehow to the fact that it's going to be an end and that you can communicate already at the beginning of the project on an end date this is basically why but the iterative cycles that we actually go through gives our clients the feeling of agility it gives us a feeling of agility too I mean it's important because our teams don't work in a tunnel in a tunnel they don't have the feeling that they start and that it's never ending until a year later it gives us the possibility to really see the results pretty fast so that's the I hope it was a little bit clearer if not we're still at both 35 by the way any other questions Well if you happen to have any we're on booth 35 we'll be having some some cocktail hour tonight at six if you want and we'll be there till the end of the week basically so I'll be happy to share this little insight with you


Hi, it's Brigitte. Welcome to Above Life Channel. This is another weekly channel conversation with a famous well-known person from the afterlife, and today's guest is a comedian that you will recognize from some very famous sitcoms. We have with us today actor, Mr. John Ritter, and welcome, John. It's nice to have you here. We had spoke briefly this weekend when you kind of popped in to my frame of a reference and my humanity as I was in a hotel, and I was flipping through the channels and came across some reruns of Three's Company, and so I did watch a bit and enjoyed that blast from the past for me. Like I grew up on the reruns. So I know you as Jack Tripper, and so that's my, that's how I enter into our channel today, and so he just kind of smiles. He's real polite. And I know that, so a few things I know about you. I know you died of a heart attack, and I know you died when you were actually in the process of filming or being part of a sitcom. You were in, you were working, like you had a series that was going well, a TV show that was going well, and so I'm not really sure the circumstances around your transition, and I'd like to talk about that just a little bit. I want to get your insight into the afterlife and what it felt like to you to transition. But I also want to just acknowledge that, so first of all, I see John is showing up as like a 50-something. I would say 52, seems a little too young. I'm thinking closer to 55 in the age range. He's broader, he's a little more filled out than his Jack Tripper days, but aren't we all, right? A little more filled out, a little more weight in the middle section of the body, and a very kind face is how I would describe him. He has a wonderful smile, a very warm smile. His energy, I hope you can feel it. So John, if you could just acknowledge or recognize that the audience, whoever is watching this video, can feel and sense your energy. And so he's literally beaming, like he just feels very generous, like very giving, and he feels positive, he feels kind, like he would help you out, he feels a bit like a mentor, like someone that you could look up to. He feels like a pretty good guy actually, and like someone you could trust, you know, and I just, I want to acknowledge that. Like I feel like I could lean on you, rely on you, kind of a good thing. Alright, so other than that, I don't know anything about you, so I'm looking forward to connecting and sharing with you, or sharing with the, getting to know you in the afterlife and sharing with the viewers of Above Life channel. Okay, so first let's start off with the transition question. This is a question I've tried to incorporate into many of the conversations that I've been having with spirits because it's important for us as humans to understand, to get a perspective. And we recognize at this point that it is unique to individuals, the way that we cross over, the way that we shift from being our matter and our human bodies and slide into the embodiment of our full spirit. And so if you could, could you, would you mind starting there and talking a little bit about that for you, that process for you? What was it like for you, the moment of your transition into the afterlife? And he kind of turned his head and he thinks he's like, that's a serious question for a comedian. And he can say, so you consider yourself a comedian? Yes. Yes, definitely. Yes, definitely. I think the body of work that I've done, my legacy is right up in the Tim Allen, you know, like the home improvement show, that's what he's kind of comparing to, that it's right up in that kind of energy genre, that there is most certainly, there have been other opportunities as well in my career, but having a successful show was really a high point of my life. It really felt good. Now, you're talking about three's company, or you're talking about the most recent one, and it's something about my dad, and I can't see it. He I know he plays a father, but I can't see the full name of it. It's like four words or something. Not sure something about a father. So at the time of your passing, can you talk about that a little bit? He said it was like that like, boom, one minute I'm here, the next minute I'm not here. He says he's expressing not feeling well. He's, he wants to strongly encourage people to know what the signs are for heart attack.  He's saying he had some of that he had experienced some of that. He was on blood, it looks like he was on blood pressure medicine or something for blood pressure, high blood pressure, or blood pressure or something. He's talking about, he's talking about blood pressure. And I feel like he was on some kind of medication for that. So I feel like he was kind of aware that he was, he was health conscious in that way. Like he knew that not, I don't think the heart thing was an awareness. So I don't know if it ran in the family or not. I think it was kind of a shock actually is to him, it was a surprise. And he's saying, I didn't feel old. I didn't feel old. He said, I felt like I was, you know, still young, like I had, I had the whole my whole life, I had to me said, I never felt really, I never really felt old. And, and he's saying, I'm not saying that I felt invincible. But he's like, kind of laughing, he's like, but I'm immortal now, I'm immortal. Now, you know, and, but he's talking about know the signs of heart attack, you've got to know the signs. He's saying it's really important, like a PSA, right? Thank you for that. Very good. All right. So he definitely died of a heart attack. And he said it was really fast. So how did it feel in your body? He says it's kind of like a squeezing. It wasn't a struggle or a suffer suffering.  Yeah, yeah, that's how he's explaining it like that. So you lay down and don't feel well or whatever, you're not feeling great. And you're trying to kind of push through and get things done. And I feel like I don't like a squeezing like almost like a twisting inside, like it's twisting, like it twists. And then like, he's trying to say like, like, great, this is a beautiful analogy. This is how Mr. John Ritter is describing his transition into the afterlife, like a bottle of champagne that you popped up, and you pop the top off, and it just goes flying. And the boom, you know, and the bubbles and everything goes everywhere. That's what it feels like, he says. So the spirit just shoots out of the body. He said like the cork on the champagne. He says, it isn't that kind of how it should be. He said, so it was only like a moment of discomfort, a moment of like tensions, like twisting or like a little squeezing and then boop, off gone. And he's saying, I attribute that, I attribute that moment that feeling to the moment of letting go, trying to hold on to the last bits of life of the human life. And then once you let go, there's just this big rush and release. And he's saying very clearly, I'm not saying it feels good to die. I'm not saying it doesn't feel good to be spirited either. I'm not recommending it for anyone. You know, when it's your time, it's your time. Oh, interesting. Do you really feel that way? Did you feel that way? Did you feel like it was your time? No, no, I felt like I was not even 30. I felt like I had my whole career ahead of me my whole life ahead of me. You know, and he's talking about having a daughter that was in college. I think he had two daughters or two girls that felt like daughters, two girls I think he has two daughters he's saying something my daughter in college. And somebody just graduating high school or something. Somebody just okay, so one daughter like in college and then another daughter and either there are his daughters or they feel like daughters. I don't know if he's referring to people on the show because I because I don't know I didn't watch the show. I don't even know what the name of the show is. But the second one was had also just had a life moment like a milestone life moment. So it was either like I got my driver's license or I graduated from high school, that kind of thing like a life moment like that. He's telling me he was a grandpa. Like he had a grandbaby grandkids. I think it's plural. There's a boy for sure little boy. I think he had grandkids. And then maybe stepkids. It looks like he was remarried, married and divorced twice, at least twice, maybe three but it's tricky because I think he's counting his TV wives. I don't know how many TV wives you've had. I don't know others that comes you've been on or other shows you've been on. Besides the three's company. Oh, then there was like a spin off and then there was a spin off of three's company. I can't remember the name of that one. But then there was also like, then there was the most recent one. So maybe he's referring to his TV wives too. He's talking about having a close knit group, a crew. He wants to say something about that. The crew on the television show that he was on when he died. Really close knit. And he said we it was just it was great. It was a great energy. It was really great energy. And he said just a really good. He said a really good group of people he's referring to young actresses or young actors. There looks like there is a boy in there. Again, two girls I see. I wonder if the two girls are the ones that actual real daughters or TV daughters.  And he says very talented young actors, very talented, good work ethic, just good kids. He says good kids, you know, and I feel like they like all this in this huge feeling of grief comes over me like I feel them being so sad for his passing. He says I he said he said, I know, I know it was painful. I know it was painful for them. You know, and I'm not sure about the details about your your transition, your death. I'm kind of now, psychically, I'm seeing it almost literally almost looks like you were on set and you, you know, had your heart attack or you weren't feeling well. I'm not sure if that was the point of the crossing of or and then it looks like going to the hospital and then that's where the it was is confirmed that you died. But I don't know if you had the heart attack on set or if you started having the symptoms on set but I feel like it was on a filming day. Is that correct? Yes, it was. Yes. Okay, because I almost get the impression that he died on set. But I don't know the exact sequence of events. It's super hard. I am just Bridget is not good with the calendar and the time and the translation of energy time. I've not been good at that. I'm working on it people working on it. But I feeling like it was a filming day. And it was either he started to get sick, had symptoms, maybe went home even and didn't feel well and then had the actual heart attack full on set. But I do see him going to the hospital and then being pronounced dead at the hospital. Is that correct? Yes. And I see him in Los Angeles in California. I see that as a part of his life that he really is connected to. He felt like he was an LA young. I don't know if he went on as a young actor like 18 19 20 really young. He talked to me about making a go of college trying to go to college and be in the theater. But and he's talking about how his parents wanted him to be an accountant. Could you imagine me as your accountant?  Kind of a thing. Could to be a metaphor. I might literally not literally mean that his parents wanted to be accountant. But you know, his parents wanted him to pursue have something to fall back on have something that would be able to support him. And looks like he went to community college or a college for a couple of years. But I don't know that he graduated. I can't see that. And I can see him doing comedy and clubs. And then I can see him going to lots of auditions and being in a commercial or two. I can really see him as being like a young actor, like just trying to make it trying to make it. I see a question of New York. I kind of see him on. Like a stage, like being in a show, like a play or something. I can see that. I was thinking about movies and I don't really see you in movies. If it was in a movie, it might have been like a supporting role or like a small much smaller part or role or could have been early on even as an extra. He's saying something about a soap opera, like he may have had a walk on on a soap opera. He could have been the waiter or something. He's talking about that.  So I see that. But I see California like Santa Monica. I see that. And like the ocean, I see that Santa Monica or Santa Barbara. Palm Springs. I see California. I definitely see California. All right. I'm trying to think if there's anything else that I wanted to specifically ask you about. Oh, do you have advice about life? What advice about being a person would you give to us? So he's thinking for a moment. There's a lot of information he'd like to share, I think. Like there's a lot of things he can instantly think about it, like spinning the wheel to pick one. He feels like fatherly, like a dad. Give an advice. And he he's just saying, he's saying, do your best. You've got to just do your best. You know, and he's talking about some days it's hard to work hard, but you've got to do what you can. He's like, those are the days that really make you. They really make you. And he's saying about actors or people who are interested in, you know, making it big in Hollywood or whether it's being on stage or being in movies or in television shows. And he's like there's so many opportunities now with Netflix and YouTube streaming. And there's just there's so many different independent things that you can do. He's like, there's a lot of opportunity, a lot more opportunity than you than you may think there is. But don't it might not be the traditional method. He's like, you've got to let yourself be creative as an actor. That's one thing that really will help you.  It will help you to stand out. He said, and you don't have to walk over people or stab people in the back. You don't have to be ruthless to be successful in Hollywood. You don't have to be ruthless to be a good actor. And he's just saying work, you know, work do work. Don't. He's like saying no job is too little. No job is too little, he said. He's talking about enjoying the moments, you know, when you get a role or you're in a situation where there's just a great team of actors or a great, a great plot or storyline or a good, good play and you get to be in it. It doesn't matter what role you're in. There are no small, small roles. You just make the best of it, enjoy it, savor it. He's like a steak, you know, just really savor it, cut into it and just savor every bite, every moment. Just savor it, savor it. Great. He says and tell them to check for the signs of heart attack because he's saying that's serious. That is serious. He's saying my death could have been prolonged or he said he's not saying, he's kind of saying that the heart thing would have got him eventually, he said, but it didn't have to be then. It could have been five years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years later, he's saying could have been, I could have been 80, he said, instead of, you know, in my 50s. And so that, from that perspective, you got to take care of your health. And he's saying, learn the signs of heart attack, learn the signs, especially if you have it in your family, heart disease in your family. All right. Thank you, Mr. John Ritter. It was a pleasure to speak with you. We appreciate it very, very much. If you have questions or comments for Mr. John Ritter or would like to hear from some other well known people, go ahead and put that in the comments below. As always, at Above Life channel, the goal is to inspire your spirit to fill you up with hope. Remember, it's your life. So love it. Thanks for being here.


Obviously John Stewart's a hard act to follow, but I think Craig Venter might be actually more difficult. But in a way, I'm actually very glad that he was able to give that presentation before we took over this panel because he really, I think, brought home the fact that there are amazing breakthroughs out there, potentially. Out there in the lab, a lot of amazing work. Anyone who works as an injury reporter like I do gets bombarded with emails about all the amazing things that are close to happening. What we want to talk about here really is how to transition that from the laboratory and bring it actually in the commercial scale. To go back in the morning, I think we really emphasize the fact that that's an enormous challenge, that we have a very well-established energy system, and much more so than I think with other forms of high tech, this is going to be a hard thing to display. So the question is, how will we get out of this, how will we take these ideas and get to the point where they're actually making a difference in the market. Now, we have a great panel to talk about this. To my left is Vim Vermas, who is a professor in the School of Life Sciences at ASU, and as you just heard, he directs a project to create fuel from bacterium. To his left is Tom Hicks, who is the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy at the U.S. Navy, who oversees really all matters to the Navy pertaining to energy conservation, energy efficiency, and green initiatives. And if you don't know that, I'm sure Tom will talk about it. The Navy is doing some really amazing things on energy and on energy efficiency. So Vim, like, start with you. I mean, we just saw your video, and in terms of the work you're doing, you're in the lab right now, you're developing those techniques. How do you, what do you foresee as the path forward for something like what you're working on? I mean, how do you get an idea that's creating great papers, creating great academic work, and how to actually begin to make a difference and what's the step for you? I think that's the first issue here that we have to think about is look for what is needed, and then try to work to word that. And what is needed is that you have... Oh, does he have... It puts a button, I think, on the inside. Okay. Sorry about that. What button? I believe it's... Select. Okay. Sorry. That we are trying to look for what is needed, and then try to work to word where you need to go. I mean, that's really one of the things that people in academia haven't typically been doing. They do what they like, and then if there is an application, then that's good. But in the energy field, it is such a big problem, and it's such a huge application that you kind of have to look for where you want to be and then work back how do you get there. So what we have been trying to look at is how do you want to produce things if you want to just grow algae and then extract fuel, extract oil, that's not going to be cost competitive from what we have seen. You have to find a way that you take the processing out of the picture. So that means that if it's possible, you have to secrete whatever your fuel is going to be. That also takes out of the picture nutrient limitations because then if you view your organism as a bio catalyst, you can just essentially be independent of the biomass. The biomass is just there, it has grown once, and it produces for a long, long time. So that takes out of the equation those issues with phosphate, with other limiting nutrients. So what we are trying to do is use photosynthetic microbes to excrete what we have is fatty acids, when there is on the same path, and then those get chemically converted into alkanes and jet fuels. So essentially have solar energy plus CO2 with the organism as a bio catalyst making alkanes eventually. So it's a direct solar to fuel type of transition that takes out of the equation the issues of, you have to make electricity or you have to make fuel no matter whether it's light or dark. In this way you can just make your fuel during the day and you can use it during the night. So that's kind of the pathway we have been going for, but the real important picture here is that you make something that you think is going to be a scalable thing, and that's oftentimes what academia generally isn't really looking for. We'll come back to the details of that. Just to just join us is Daniel Betz, who is the director of fuel cell technologies for inner fuel. And if them is sort of the scientist in the laboratory in academia still, Daniel is working for a company that's trying to commercialize a new clean tech technology, trying to actually sell it. So Daniel, you may just talk a little bit about the work you're doing, what you're actually doing with fuel cells in terms of the company, and also maybe just begin to outline some of the challenges. Once you actually have the technology, now you actually have to do the work of finding the market and making sure that you can succeed. You've got to press the button on top, sorry, that turns it green. Oh, it should work. Oh, there you go. There you go. Technology's hard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's part of it. Well, yeah, I work for Inner Fuel, which is the fuel cell entity of Inner One. Inner One produces lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and grid energy storage, and Inner Fuel is developing fuel cell systems that work in synergy with the battery. And the idea is of having a fuel cell company along with a battery company has been that we're projecting into the future what are the limitations that exist on the rollout of vehicle technology. What are the things that are external forces that may prevent and increase the uncertainty associated with the rollout of electric vehicles and grid energy storage technology. And then to use technology, such a fuel cell that is complementary in order to reduce the potential effect that those barriers have. On the electric vehicle side, for example, when we are introducing electric vehicles, there are major, major barriers. One is the barrier of energy storage in a battery. Batteries don't have as much energy packing capacity as normal internal combustion engines or gasoline, and therefore you have limited range of these vehicles. And the other side to it is that you need to charge them up, and therefore you need to have a plug-in infrastructure for them. And so we believe that there is definitely a market for this due to the way that you can segment the market into having city cars or fleet vehicles that are electric and the electric vehicles can do a very good job. For the wider consumer market, this is a little bit more difficult. And so the industry recognizes this and therefore we're moving into PHEVs, which have an internal combustion engine. But when we forecast that, we realize that the internal combustion engine has to become smaller and smaller and smaller. And therefore the efficiency and emissions of the internal combustion engine become harder, you know, efficiency drops and the emissions increase or potential increase. And therefore a fuel cell may be better suited for that application. And one of the things that we're looking at is basically in the scale-up is trying to have a pathway to a technology that is ultimately useful and less dependent on government infrastructure or infrastructure in terms of fuels, like most of the other vehicle technologies on the electric field have had. One of the interesting things that happens is that as we're looking at this technology, we're not concentrating on just replacement on the internal combustion engine, but we believe that the adoption of new technologies is primarily done by offering the user an enhancement over the existing technology. And so the electric vehicle allows to do that. You get a great torque, et cetera. You get a lifestyle where you are free of the perceived burden of environmental, you know, the environmental damage that you're creating with a vehicle. But with the introduction of the fuel cell, we're looking at ways of really enhancing the comfort and the value of the vehicle. For example, the vehicle with a fuel cell, the fuel cell produces zero toxic emissions. It produces lower CO2, but no nitrous oxides, CO, sulfur dioxide, and all these other terrible chemicals. And thus, it can stay running in the vehicle while the vehicle is parked or idle. This has enormous benefit. It can recharge your batteries at very high efficiencies, but also it can provide comfort system for your vehicle. So your air conditioning could stay on or be turned on before you get to the vehicle. And therefore, you eliminate the concept of having a vehicle that is too hot or too warm. The other thing that you can do is have the fuel cell provide its heat for the vehicle, and therefore you eliminate forever the idea of having to scrape ice off your vehicle. So once you start doing things like this, the value proposition of this vehicle changes completely from being something that is equivalent, but something that is dramatically enhanced over the existing technology. So that's how we're always looking at how to increase the value proposition of the technology and how these technologies come together to change the lifestyle of people in a way that is irreversible. I'll give an example. I live in Florida and we have air conditioning in homes. Let me tell you, that makes living in Florida possible, in my opinion. But also it's irreversible. Once you have it, you're never going back. And so you'll pay for it. We'll return that idea because it's the point that an idea won't scale unless it's something that offers something additional to an audience and a consumer. But of course the question I think is going to be what really is additional. For Tom, the Navy and the Armed Forces really are in many ways, they're a major consumer of energy. They're the last part of this equation. It starts in university, it goes to a company. You're the ones who are actually using energy on a mass scale. What is the Navy doing to shape that market to maybe encourage the scaling up those kinds of technologies that private consumers or a private company would be less able to do? I think notably last week was the 236th birthday of the Navy. And I think if you look back at the history of the Navy, we have a history of being at the forefront of energy revolutions. So we went from sail to coal to power our ships. We went from coal to oil. We added nuclear and I'll say safely last better part of 50, 60 years for that. And all along the way we had challenges. We had known infrastructures that we were trading for unknown infrastructures. But in each case it was the right thing to do. In each case we added capability to the Navy. And we think as it relates to advanced alternative fuels that this will be no different. And then we're going to be part of this as well. We're going to have some challenges that we'll work through but this will be no different. We're also aware of a number of studies. And I think just the last speaker before us talked about the future of algae maybe being 10 years out. We've seen studies whether it's MIT or LMI and there's been a number of others that say this market won't be mature until 2020, 2025. We can't wait that long. And so we're doing something about it. But let me just tell you before I get to that is tell you why. And for us energy security is national security for us. If you think about it that you know where we buy our fuel we buy our fuel from one of 600 places around the world. Ultimately that fuel sourced from more often not countries that don't necessarily share our world view our perspective. And the alternative fuels offers us the promise to make changes there to really be thoughtful about whom we purchase fuel from in the future. And that's something that's really important to us. And as you can imagine that has strategic implications too. If we're getting more of our fuel from ourselves and being more energy independent if we're getting more of our fuel from countries that we are aligned with politically and otherwise that this has strategic impacts for us as well. But there's another piece to it and it relates to this. So what we see in the current fuels market we all know the trend over time is up. And it jumps around, it spikes up, spikes down. But the trend is overall up. For us though that we can absorb that trend but the spikes just kill us. So let me just give you an example of that. So in the past year the price per barrel fuel that we pay in the Navy has gone up $38 a barrel. To put that in perspective as an organization that consumes 30 million barrels of fuel per year $1 billion over the course of a year of budget uncertainty. $1 billion that we didn't budget for. $1 billion that Congress is not going to provide to us especially in this climate. And so what do we do? Well that impacts how frequently we steam our ships how frequently we fly our planes. So literally we have countries if you will that are organizations that control that price of fuel that have some say into our ability to conduct our missions or train and so on. Certainly that does not affect operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya and things like that but certainly it has an impact. And so that's why we're really interested in alternative fuels and really think it is the way of the future. Now what are we doing about it? So we could wait until the market is able to deliver fuels and the quantities and the price points could wait until 2020, 2025 and say we're there. We have stated goals that by 2020 half of our fuel will come from alternative sources but we know we need a ramp to get there. We also have stated that in 2012 we're going to demonstrate our interest in this area by having a carrier strike group go out and local operations on 50-50 blends of alternative fuels and then in 2016 going back to the Great White Fleet which turned the last century we're going to deploy that strike group and send it out over the horizon, look to unwrap it along the way. We think those are powerful signals but we also to the market but we also know we need to build a ramp to getting fuels at the right price points and in the right quantities for us. So what are we doing? So since March of this year we've been working with USDA and DOE as requested by the president, requested the Navy work with USDA and DOE to accelerate the alternative fuels market in this country. What we have done since signing an MOU between the three organizations has committed over a period of a number of years collectively a half billion dollars of investment that we will seek a price match from industry using existing authorities, powerful authorities that have existed for the last 60 years whose purpose, by the way, is to stand up industries where it's been identified as being critical to defense needs and energy has been identified as one of those critical needs. So we're looking to use that authority to identify, I shouldn't say identify, but to address the risk areas that can help stand up this capacity and capability in this country. So prior to March and actually ongoing I should say we've been very engaged with industry, the companies themselves, we've talked to venture capital, we've talked to, and I shouldn't say talked to, we have ongoing relationships with them as well as institutional investors, academia and others to understand what are the risk areas? What's preventing this market from being a mature market that's capable of being competitive with petroleum? And what we hear are kind of three risk areas. One is feedstock risk. In many cases we're standing up a new segment of the agricultural community or others that don't exist today. Two is I would kind of call it CAPEX and OPEX. Is there enough money for the bricks and mortar, the ongoing operations of the plant? And the third would be off-take risk. Do we have a customer there that can have a long-term relationship and contract? And what's attracted us to the Defense Production Act and led us there is that that can address all three of those areas. We can share risk with those companies in all three of those areas and in any varying degree. So if a company needed more effort on the feedstock side and less on CAPEX, you can do it. It's very flexible. We really see this as the way that we're going to execute, going forward so that we can ensure that the fuels won't be competitive in 2020 and 2025, but hopefully in 2014, 2015 and 2016. And I think these authorities are very powerful and will allow us to do that once we get all the funding necessary to align to support that. And again, this is an authority that's been around for 60 years. This is not intended to be a long-term government subsidy. The point of the Defense Production Act is to create a market and get out as soon as you can. And so we're looking at this as a two, three-year, four-year effort period and then at the end of that, we as a customer will be there. And the last point I'll make is, why is this different than what the government's done before? I think it's different in one key area. So USDA and DOE have, as many of you probably know, loan guarantee programs and grant programs related to alternative fuels. What was missing in those though, and I think those in many ways are necessary and there's a lot of goodness as we say in the Navy is coming out from those. But what's missing is a customer and that's where we come in, where we can align the USDA's connection to the agricultural community with DOE's connection to the technical portion of this with Navy as a customer. And I think that's what we're looking to do with this effort and we're looking to play a role in our future in building up this domestic capability in the country. Daniel, Tom talked about the importance of the Navy can serve as a customer and something in a big kind of way. I know, you know, your parent company is having some financial difficulties really in part because of looking for that market. You know, how do you as a company when you're developing a new kind of technology at this point, you know, it's very open. Is it going to be biofuels? Is it going to be fuel cells? Is it going to be lithium ions? Is it for you to try to prepare that sort of technology and spend that kind of money knowing that market is in flux in some ways? Right, so these are big bets that you take, but there is definitely an uncertainty in the way that demand will be materialized. You believe that demand will materialize eventually because you have a very strong value proposition, but it is uncertain how and how fast and to which scale things will happen and that's part of the risk of new technology and part of the risk of building out new technology because there is definitely in scaling up there are a series of chicken and egg problems. One of them is the problem of demand versus supply. There is an expectation that demand will occur, but demand doesn't occur unless supply is large enough to establish the economies of scale where you can get price points that create the demand. And so those two are not really talking to each other. There is an expectation that once you get to a certain scale demand will happen, but it may not happen as you expect. And here is where the government does a very good job. If government starts signaling that they have a need for the product and therefore they are willing to say if you build it and meet these specifications we will guarantee that the demand exists and it will exist in this way then it eliminates that source of uncertainty associated with the build up of scale. But in the private industry that's a little bit harder to do. And the other chicken and egg that I wanted to point out is the idea of specifications of whether when you are going through... you have a technology in the laboratory the technology as its scale changes in performance. And I see this primarily in the fuel cell side as you can expect a certain performance once you get into the field and mass production but you don't know what that is until you actually get into the field and have mass production and sold a certain number of these systems and have field validation and the government actually and DOD has done a good job in certain aspects of doing the testing of the technology such that that uncertainty is reduced but it's definitely one of the things that hampers technology and innovation. And another thing is the military market and government markets are very good to prime the pump of technology but the really big markets are outside are consumer markets that really drive the value of the company you want to have everybody driving cars with fuel cells and lithium ion batteries in them you want to have every home with distributed generation systems you want to have telecom power with baseline with fuel cell power systems in tandem with batteries etc these are sort of like where things could go and however there's a dramatic difference in specifications between the military market and the consumer market and some of these specifications that are given in the military market make it such that technology development takes off in a tangent that it's hard to bring it back to consumer markets so this is an item of discussion with some of the people in the Navy we've also done some things you've got the internet, you've got GPS we've done some things absolutely there's this concept of spiral development that you know as you go and enter new markets prototype get new products into the field that information that you obtain with that even niche market in the product is the thing that gives you the confidence to go to the big markets and so definitely this is that sort of spiral development I think there's a role there for government to play in those types of things, we've done it as I mentioned kind of jokingly but as you look at the alternative fuels market for us for example we would be a large airline if you looked at our fuel usage that said we also have a unique role because I think every major airline if I'm not mistaken in the last 10 years has filed for bankruptcy so there's some credibility issues there that I would argue we don't necessarily have those same ones and so we bring I think a value to that market and we can help so we really see our ability to help lead the making of this market I think you're absolutely right, it's going to be in this case commercial aviation, commercial maritime we're really going to be the ones that make the market but we can play that early role that I think government has done time and time again and I think that's for us and the Navy that's what we're looking to do as well You mentioned I think not every academic researcher thinks about what ideas can scale up when they're working on that why is that? Is it they're not sort of primed? Is there the sort of mindset necessary when people are doing that kind of work to think long term in terms of what idea will actually have that potential payoff what is it that makes you I suppose in your work different in that sense Well most academic scientists pursue an idea and develop that that's the sort of acquisition of knowledge of new ideas that's oftentimes what is driving innovation but in order to make that really work what you have to do is then also think about how are we going to scale it in the biofuels area one of the realities is there is a lot of infrastructure that you need to build that's not yet there there's photo bio reactor systems if you want to pump around to a lot of water there might be much better systems that haven't been developed yet so everybody sort of does their part but the parts don't necessarily all fit together biofuels that has been only something that has been seriously considered again since 2005-2006 before that there were a variety of things that kind of didn't pan out quite so it's really a young set of people coming together in terms of knowledge that needs to be put together in something that's actually going to work at the larger scale so it's you can't be so broad in science that you know of all the bits and pieces and those bits and pieces need to be brought together and that takes time and things of the caliber of 500 million or so that will be invested by the Navy that's going to be a real driver in bringing together those pieces that we really don't have yet we have the pieces but they are not a whole thing Craig Venter sort of implicitly criticized I think the way some funding is given out in terms of scientific research basically for not going after those breakthrough potential ideas is that your experience? Yeah there are some areas that are kind of innovative and there are those that require you to show that you have essentially already done the work and then they give you the money to do it and IH is a bit in the letter category there are areas RPE is probably a good example there of where you're trying to look what you need to do and then put the team together to make that work and bring all the innovations to gather that and some of your funding does come from RPE right but you know that that is a quite a different mindset that's more on the DARPA model whereas the NSF for example they have been always saying yeah we need to recognize innovation much more but at the panel level that never gets done because their funding rates are so awfully low that they can't take any risks you know they have problems funding stuff that is really working and that is going places and then to say okay you know here we have some really innovative proposals that we need to fund there's just not the need to actually make that work I wanted to point out that you asked the question along the same vein in that even though the technology that you're working on is not globally scalable it may be locally scalable and therefore it has merit sorry when you say locally like for example I don't believe that there has to be one fuel for the entire world you know that to me doesn't really make much sense actually because the planet is very diverse and resources that exist around the world are diverse and therefore your local resource may be good enough for you to fuel a town, a city or a group of resources may be able to fuel a town or a city or a portion of it may be thinking about it in terms of global magnitude now from venture capital standpoint it really looks great to think about things like you know I'm going to create that fuel that's going to fuel the entire world but I think that that's not very pragmatic because you end up in doing infrastructure problems and scale up problems and but when you know we talked earlier about the cell phone model in which you know they really use satellites and everything and then local guys are going around with you know towers and cell phones and that just have towers and radio for people to see I mean we have a long way to get before we get anywhere near the entire world I mean just electric vehicles so the idea of market segmentation and pathway is critical so instead of saying everything has to be scalable you're going to say no no no it's okay to have something mediocre in this area but it works in this situation and therefore it allows you it starts creating the pathways and the potential serendipities that create real innovation that will take you to the next step I see what you mean but it is it is sort of tough and energy for that way because it's not like cell phones in the sense that you were adding essentially a new industry that even though first when it began the phones were the size of car batteries and barely worked and gave you brain cats or properly a new set of values whereas with a lot of renewable energy you're not necessarily adding you may add value in terms of energy security in terms of diversification certainly in terms of cleaning up the environment but in terms of functionality not necessarily so it just seems like that challenge is all the greater and I wanted to ask you in terms of obviously a big part of this is improving your technology the better your fuel cells the better your batteries get the more competitive you'll be how important is manufacturing it's not just about being in the lab I mean and that's because manufacturing these kind of things is not cheap by any means absolutely not and it's one of the biggest hurdles and it's a hurdle in two areas one is you need a lot of capital to go to manufacturing you need to be able to hit price points and you have a technical uncertainty associated with it and so for example our company has put a lot of manufacturing effort in the United States and Indianapolis some of our competitors are definitely putting a lot of manufacturing capabilities outside the United States and taking advantage of structural benefits from that you know but but one of the games that you play is the farther you know how you do manufacture also affects your capacity to do product development so the farther away you put manufacturing from your R&D the less capabilities to do the breakthrough R&D becomes because you are farther away from the real problems of the product and so and that's actually a problem that the United States is facing moving into the future in terms of innovation because innovation actually comes from having feedback from the customer and having feedback from the manufacturing plant and what's going wrong and so as a company you have to balance that sort of risk of detangling yourself from manufacturing if you are a startup or do you keep it and then you need much higher risk and much higher capital requirements so I mean does not to step on the toes of the government policy panel that's coming later but I mean you know is it reasonable to expect a company like yours to be able to weather these difficulties I mean to spend tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to sort of do that go through that learning cycle while trying to create a market knowing this is all very uncertain I think it's worth it because nothing is wasting I'll give you the example of where a company comes from okay we are there the NRDEL which is a battery component of NR1 grows out of a joint venture and eventually a buyout of the Delphi battery technology now why is Delphi giving up its battery technology because EV1 failed right so it's not wasted it's just in the public's mind it's a series of failures but failure is a requirement for success if you're always winning you're running with losers okay so you must you must be willing to recognize that there are going to be failures and barriers in a way but that those are very important for your learning curve and so and nothing is wasted so we now have this technology and we've enhanced it and the same happens on the side of the fuel cell the fuel cell company in our fuel is riding riding high on the innovation of a bunch of companies that have done well, badly, and failed you know all over the gamut but the technology stays behind advancements have stayed behind people have stayed behind with know-how that allow you to move the technology forward and continue to develop and get it closer to the finish line so you have to have an appetite for that I like that line losers run with back winners but I mean it's a very painful process as well from an economic perspective failure is going to be part of that and I wanted to turn to Tom the US Navy does not have shareholders but you are taxpayers so you are obviously responsible to them do you have concerns about meeting these kind of goals or what if these goals prove harder to meet and I also wanted to ask you about you know that the RAND study that I know you are aware from earlier this year that questioned I think the military and the Navy's focus especially on biofuels so maybe you could respond to that as well but I mean how do you deal with are you ready to accept that kind of failure that might be part of this process well I mean I think another way to say what was just said is you know you can't have innovation without failure I mean that's just part of you know I think you know innovation is a function of many things and one of them is your tolerance for risk and if you have no tolerance for failures you're not going to get the innovation that you want and I think you know as we we have our own programs through the Office of Naval Research and the Naval Research Lab and through other efforts the small business investment innovative research program where we invest in emerging technologies and provide grants for emerging technologies and not all of them work and but you learn from those and those companies learn from those failures and other companies learn from those but you're advancing things down the field and toward a better solution I think and whether it's a failure because of business whether it's a failure because of the technology but you learn in that and I think that's important ability for all of government and I would say any investor to accept that type of risk and as you look at the venture capital community that's what they do they're in the business of assuming some failure threshold and that's how they make or break themselves I suppose on that second question I would with respect to the report that came out in January I would reference folks and I think it's up on OSD's website now to a report done the following year but just recently from LMI that is a very thorough understanding of the alternative fuels market done with a number of folks across academia and others to really try to understand all the different aspects of the market the report that came out last January I think was unfortunate and it's conclusions I think were ultimately flawed and we've made that, we've been public about that and we've said that to the Hill as well and we've talked to members of Congress as well on this and it was flawed for these reasons I mean it suggested that the best near term solution for the government as it relates to alternative fuels was to and if there's anybody in this room we can talk later about this was to essentially look at cold liquid but really looking at cold liquid fuels and to mitigate the kind of emissions penalty you would get from that suggested that we invest in and tap into carbon capture and storage so cold liquid you know the technology of fish or tropes behind that's been around since before too, it's fine it can be done for good and for I would say not so good as it relates directly to cold liquid or coal plus biomass I think we've seen those as well the challenges are the emissions that you get from that we are prohibited in the government from procuring fuels that have a life cycle greenhouse gas emissions worse than what we're currently using petroleum and without some other mitigation cold liquid just doesn't do that so the other mitigation that's suggested is carbon capture and storage which by the way we haven't done yet in this country, I mean lots of research going on it's important research that DOE and others are doing but we haven't done it at commercial scale and then lastly I would just say the cost to build such a facility by the authors I think own admission is 5 to 10 billion dollars is what you need to do to get it at scale and we don't even and it doesn't even talk about the impact to water the impact to the environment and where you're going to site one of these things I think there's a lot more effort that could go into those technologies whether it's carbon capture and storage fisher tropes and processes but to offer that as the best near term solution in light of what we see as how quickly the alternative the other alternative fuels markets are developing and biofuels in other areas it just didn't make sense to us and we reflected that back to the Hill, back to the author who by the way didn't engage the Navy in his report but that's a knit but anyway so I would encourage folks to really look at the LMI report because I'll just say this I don't agree with everything that's in that air and balance report and I think this other one I wouldn't put that same label on it would be ironic to have like a 21st century Navy that suddenly is being fueled by coal again a bit of a throwback if anything let's go back to sail why not? officially that's not the Navy's position just to be clear we have about 5 minutes left so I'm going to open it up to questions down there the question is for Wim if you are trying to get algae to secrete their oil which is a laudable goal everyone would like to do it you are going to be facing a challenge you either need sterile reactors because you don't want bacteria eating that oil as fast as they can get it but if you have the sterile reactors it's going to be too expensive to make for fuel and you're going to be using a lot of antibiotics how are you going to deal with that? that is indeed a fair question and a difficult one there are methods just as much as you can put into a cyanobacterium or algae the potential to make fatty acids you can also have them make things that will kill of competitors so it's just one more step of synthetic biology that you can employ and we are working on making that happen indeed sterility is a difficult thing but there are also compounds some of the fatty acids are fairly non biocompatible the shorter the chain length gets the less organisms actually can use it as a feedstock for themselves so there are a variety of ways around it and it's not something that has a solution right at this moment but there are four or five different ways that collectively will yield one this question is for you Mr. Hicks my understanding was that the U.S. Air Force is flying on cold liquids today they are identifying their aircraft on that fuel so are there differing regulations for the Navy versus the Air Force or is there any attempt to rationalize policy across all the branches the Air Force is not flying on cold liquids today they are held to the same fuel requirements that we are any fuel it's not petroleum must have a life cycle greenhouse gas emissions profile equal to or less than petroleum that's the law that's section 526 of ESA2007 that said they did have a program that invested in and did testing and certification along those areas I think as ESA2007 came out that made that more difficult for them I will say they have a progressive testing program and certification program as do we we have completed all of our manned and unmanned aircraft testing and we are in the process of doing the same for our surface vessels we share data between Air Force and Navy back and forth on similar platforms and they have efforts underway now in testing and certifying around HRJs looking at cellulosic fuels alcohol to jet they are very much moved on from that area so I think that might have been true in the past but we as DOD as a government are not allowed to purchase those fuels and frankly I think that as DOD has said as well that provision in ESA2007 is good policy we can argue about if it's well written policy and I think it's something that we need to take seriously because it has impacts to you know not just it has impacts into making the right choices about fuels So for just one more question Yeah, I'm charging by sister manned Mr. Heck so far since nuclear energy worked fine for Navy when Navy increased nuclear usage in the future So all of our subs and all of our carriers are nuclear powered and that accounts for about 17% of our total energy use those were done because they made economic sense but also because they gave us additional mission capabilities we can now go underwater for months at a time without having to refuel steam our carriers for you know half a year or more and actually we can go longer much longer than that and not have to kind of do any refueling I think as we look at other potential platforms that's something that we'll continue to look at and whether that makes sense to bring into other platforms it's going to be more driven kind of from the economic perspective now on the shore side you know so we have I think I know we have safely used nuclear power for the better part of 60 years in our fleet and so there's a lot of folks who think we could have those similar sized reactors or small module reactors and use those for our shore facilities and that's an area that we're looking at as well I think though it's a you know we're looking forward to say Oak Ridge National Lab I know they're looking to put a small module reactor in and how that will go through the NRC the nuclear regulatory committee about the process and the permitting of that I think some folks think that the Navy or DOD has some ability to ignore certain laws and environmental we're held to the same if not higher standards for that so we would still have to go through the same environmental permitting the same you know all the other permitting that's going to be associated with something like that so that's I think it's going to be on a case by case basis on that end as well as with our ships but I think what we have today we're very comfortable with and as you'll see with our new carrier coming out it's also going to be nuclear powered and we're committed to our carriers and subs for nuclear power well thank you very much to our panel and thanks for your attention as well thank you Brian