to all, let the other guys get the coffee. To start with, my name is Venkatesh Suryan. I do reference Venkat. Along with me, my colleague, Anil. We are going to walk through the journey of agile transformation done in Cisco video business. So predominantly, to start with, yeah, as I said, it's me. Around 14-plus years of experience I have in embedded domain, working for various areas of product development and customer delivery projects in domains like consumer electronics, mobile multimedia, and digital broadcasting. On top of that, four-plus years of agile experience I have in transforming the organization within Cisco, as well as executing research-based projects, product development, and customer projects. Hi, I'm Anil, Senior Product Manager at Cisco. I have about 17 years of experience in the digital TV domain, mostly focused around project management, project delivery, pre-sales, and currently part of the product management team in Cisco Video Client Solutions, focused on the software side of the set-up box solutions. Yeah, so the moment when we say Cisco, people do connect with routers or networking systems. But this Cisco is related to pay TV. Like we, I was part of NDS three years before, so Cisco has acquired NDS. We were into pay TV business. So we were predominant into cable, digital broadcast, satellite, mobile, and internet. So these are the kind of end-to-end solutions we give to our end customers who are nothing but operators. And this is the kind of product portfolio we have. We have standard definitions of our set-up box, high definition, HDP VR, IP box, video everywhere. So these are the kind of product solutions we do, you know, deliver to our customers. As of now, we have been engaged with, or the partners who are engaged with us is around 47-plus pay TV operators worldwide. And we have around 78-plus million subscriber base. And these are some of the few customers who have been working with us. So in this journey, why agile for our Cisco Video Business? So if you see in the pay TV space or even video viewing space, there is a lot of changes been happening from last one decade. And there is a lot of changes are happening in marketplace, which are pretty much fast. And we need to catch up with that to sustain our business model and to ensure the existing customer base and to get the same revenues. And then for the employees to focus and to have fun at work, like as Z just bought the Joy. The Joy part, we just wanted to, you know, be ensuring that. And then we want to improve the predictability of launching the complex features. Like earlier, we used to have a new feature which we want for six months. We used to take for deploying it to launch it one-and-a-half years. So we want time to market also to improve. So I'm going to cover this journey into three stages. One is with the preparation, whatever we did, and how did we kicked off and how are we maturing right now? So basically, we have three levels of transformation categories we did. One is on the organization level. Second one is on the execution level and the people level. So predominantly from the organization and execution level, my colleague, Anil, will speak about it. And on the people level, I will speak about it. I expect to have two things in my head. I'll do that. A lot of... I realized I was sitting in Dananjay's presentation. A lot of... I would say a lot of commonality in the issues, the issues and the challenges we tried to resolve in our journey. So before I take you on the journey, I'll just give a bit of a history in that from our NDS and into the Cisco days, we did have some form of agile pre-2014 localized some teams picking up agile methodologies, trying to implement it and see how it works with them. We had some local success. We had some failures. And around early 2014, end of 2013, the senior leadership of our group had an opportunity to take the whole group, around 550 people, a full agile transformation, backed on the Cisco escape velocity program. So this was a Cisco-wide program which encouraged the engineering organization to adopt agile. So as part of that, the leadership team decided to take the whole team, the whole organization, into the transformation, agile transformation. And I think one of the key decision points is your leadership signing up for this. And they're deciding that they have a business need to make this transformation. And then you come to the problem of the structural situation that you have, the org structure that you have, and having to move it from a traditional system to a pro-agile structure that would help you on your journey. So we were organized component-based. The expertise were built in components, and the team was built around components. We had multiple components. We were a layered architecture, and we built up the reporting structure in such a way that it matched the components that we had in the architecture. And to supplement that, we had a metrics organization which had a set of project managers and an integration and validation team which would then support this team into taking whatever code was done by the component team, integrate it and deliver it to the customer. So this is the organization structure we had. And from here, we had to move to a pro-agile thing. We had to go to cross-functional teams and move from the component-based structure to end-to-end cross-functional feature teams. And this is where we ended up. So we had Scrum teams which report into directors that report into the general manager, and in the support, we had the other roles, the product owners, Scrum masters, strategists, and the product managers. You had the coaches also as an integral part of our organization. So this was the organization level change. The second one was to have an execution model change. So I just told you about how our architecture was organized. And you would see that from the system architecture, each component derived their design, did their coding, did their release as a component piece of code. And then it was delivered. So this is a very waterfall model with parallel component development happening. And then you have an integration team which is specialized to a particular customer who would do the big-bang integration of all that is required for that, all the development that has been done by the component teams for that particular customer, integrated, fixed all the issues that you find in the component level integration, and then delivered into the product. Now, if you scale this, you would see that for the second project, for the second customer, you would have another team, another integration team which would do a similar work of taking all the component development and then integrating it and delivering it to the product. So you had a problem of the scaling of your integration teams to deliver to customer, and it had to pass through that big-bang integration, the waterfall model, and then the big-bang integration before reaching the product. So there was a lot of time spent in delivering it to the product. So the pro agile execution model that we came up, which is you have Scrum teams that work on the same projects now, customer projects, they do their design, development, and integration and deliver directly into the product. So we have eliminated the need of that integration team that we had in between. So similar the scaling of it, you had for the second project another set of Scrum teams delivering their changes directly into product, and this point that we had quicker deliveries to the product and more deliveries to the product on a frequent basis. Now, in this journey, in the execution model transformation, we did see one interesting problem in that when we were in the component structure, the expertise was very local, and we had component experts who helped in the design and then helped in the review. Once you moved to a cross-functional Scrum teams where you had people from across components, you suddenly had to fill in this gap because you were now cross-functional and across components.  So the primary aim of having the integrators is to keep the sanctity of our main trunk. They are the gatekeepers of the architecture. Each team builds or contributes to the moderators and have sufficient moderators so that whatever they check in does not break the code and the main trunk. And we have encouraged these moderators to transform from being local experts to being vertical cross-functional moderators. So now comes on the people part. So when we are having the traditional waterfalls, we have roles like project manager, program manager, component manager, component lead, team lead. So when we want to move these roles to pro agile roles, where we have product owner, Scrum master and individual contributor or a Scrum team member. So that is where we had to go through a challenge. How should we do that? That is where the senior management has taken the people part also seriously, where the individual preferences are being asked. Why are we like what are the business priorities we have? And based on that, there was a room given for an individual to say that, you know, I want to become a PO maybe and then see for six prints and if it doesn't fit. So he will be given a second chance to, you know, take other role. So that kind of room was given and then we moved from the fancy designation kind of a, you know, hierarchy to a profession-based roles. That means when you're opting for as a PO or a Scrum master, you are really thinking as a profession, not like, you know, the project manager, senior project manager, instead of that, you try to contribute to that role more efficiently and effectively. Like as Scrum master, you start with one team, then be a Scrum master for two teams, then, you know, you scale up as a Scrum master. So for any organization like as we discussed in the morning, few sessions here about the culture and values. So definitely every organization comes with a culture which has good and bad, whether you are following waterfall or whether you are following agile. So now when you're trying to take this transformation, you just review what are the good parts of your culture you have as organization, what are the strengths and what are the things you want as organization to unlearn.  So this is how like the senior management and the teams together signed off on a values. This is what the way forward on these values we live with. Whenever we have any dilemma on, you know, doing these things or that things. So let's see this value as a sounding board, make it visible across and try to navigate, you know, our decision making based on these values. So that then only it will mature our practices or the ceremonies, whatever we are following on that we can sustain over the time. So keeping that values in mind when we started, this is where we said that the first, the senior management team, say for example, vice president, director, whoever are the key elements of that BU are the ones who are going to take the leadership training first so that they work in the form of a scrum so that they can lead by example. So they had a five day regress training. They formed as a scrum team. They created the transformation backlog. How should we, you know, way forward do the transformation for around, you know, 550 people? How about it? So they created the backlog items. They created the storyboard. They have a scrum board. So they had led with example and then they hired external coaches who can able to guide them so that if there are any behavioral changes or with about practicing the ceremonies, they are of great help. And this is where the outcome of that backlog was translate into seven batches where we have around 60 to 70 people, you know, from spread it across to four or five backlogs of whether it is a feature backlog, product backlog or a project backlog. And then a primary coach has been identified for each backlog who can able to hand hold them and guide them for the first six sprints. So we had to start with, we had two external coaches and two internal coaches to start with. And this is the, you know, a kind of a steps we take once the batches are identified, backlogs are identified. This is the circle they go through. At each backlog, we identify the leadership team. For them, we identify it and then we have a three days training for them so that they understand what are the ceremonies, what is agile is all about, what is agile manifesto and what is the obstacle, what is the definition of done. So these things were been taught in the training and then they create a leadership backlog for the backlog, whether it is a customer project or a feature project or, you know, or a product. So they create that. You have the team training for three days and then they execute a mini sprint so that they understand what is the prioritization, how the planning is done, how the retrospectives are done, how the daily stand up has been performed. So in the one week mini sprint, we do that and then a hand holding for the team by the coaches will be there for the next six weeks. So in that process, what happens is people first understand on the process part so that they all get aligned and the work creating working agreements. So people slowly start moving into that agile mindset and then after that, whenever the support is needed, we do that. As our business actually is a little bit complicated, as I said, we are into pay TV. We have an end-to-end deployment. Say for example, satellite, uplink, downlink. You have a head end and you have a box at different subscriber base. When we are releasing an image, there is a margin of error should be very low. So in that case, the competencies may not be located across multiple sites which are distributed scrum teams. So when you are starting this journey, the key important thing is we need to get along with all of them including delivery, account, sales, end-to-end architect, everybody together in this journey to make it success. With that kickstart, how are we in the maturing process? As we are dealing with a product which is having legacy on top of that which has been matured in the fields from last 10 years, on top of that we are creating new features. The first thing we have is technical depth. For any organization to mature and practice agile and move faster, we need to assess the technical depth. The kind of technical depth we had is with respect to automation, CA infrastructure. There are many ways, many technical testing. From manual testing, you want to move to automation testing. Or your build is taking like 10 hours. So these are all things which may be exist and you need to see are these a depth which you can able to clear in a day or it is going to be long term. Then you need to strategize that to make faster the teams to move faster and close the stories. So some of the things what we did was we created a working agreement. Then we created a definition of done with buy-in of the scrum teams where they said if I am writing a one line of a code, introducing it. These are the things I adhere to and I follow. Then the second thing is like technical depths are little very like monster kind of a thing to handle that. We said technical depth reduction day and we set a theme for each backlog. Somebody might have a technical depth of automation. Somebody might have a technical depth of building the build infrastructure. So these things all hands one day so that they can contribute and reduce the depth whatever we have. And also like effective engineering practices. Apart from that another flow is about obstacles. So this is something people do refer and the hardest part of any obstacle is like to realize that. Like what is the obstacle which is slowing down the team or in that backlog. If we realize it, I think the 50% of the problem is solved. So for this what we did was we had a kind of a visibility workflow where we said the scrum teams when they are trying to do the daily stand up they say based on the task break up you know I cannot able to move the task forward. Is there any obstacle? It could be anything. Like obstacle can start with a server room adjacent sitting to a developer is making noise and I am not able to work properly. Starting with that your build is taking like longer times. Your CA infrastructure is not robust. I don't have the APIs to be developed or I don't have the reviewer available on time. So it could start with from very small things which can slow down to any major you know systemic obstacles your organization have. The key workflow is bring this surface it out first and bring it visible to the organization within the team and outside the team so that whoever has the competency to act and resolve it faster. This workflow has helped us a lot. So we have a promotion criteria also in this is like after 48 hours if the team cannot able to resolve that obstacle we promote it to the program board. So we bring the visibility to the program level. If within 48 hours we don't get that we bring it to the exact level so that we wanted to bring the highest attention that if this obstacle is not resolved we cannot able to close this story or this release as an impact. So that we play a kind of key role and here Scrum Master is the one who actually plays a key role in identifying, nailing it, solving it and tracking it. So some of the systemic obstacles what we have encountered in our journey so far is like poor build CI infrastructure poor automation infrastructure shortage of competencies inflexible software architecture. So what are the ways we have dealt so far is like the poor build infrastructure like we had a CI earlier which used to run for 24 hours but the point is the reliability and the robustness of that was challenged and then we took an action item on that obstacle and then the resolution was we invested in the infrastructure we increased the number of build servers we need and also the frequency of the feedback so that a developer when he check-ins he knows that he has made a foul or you know is it good so that 4 hours, 12 hours so that there is a constant feedback which gives to the developer in a day at least twice or twice. Then the poor automation infrastructure like we had a huge number of manual test cases which we need to run to ensure that there is no regression for the code what we are going to deliver to customer but the time taken to complete that manual testing was huge and if we want to really get an instant feedback for the you know only automation is the only way out and for us to build that automation infrastructure from scratch it is a huge obstacle that is what we also identify as a technical depth the resolution what we found was at least once in a month like one day in a month all the you know workforce within our BU put hands on different features whatever we have and build the you know at least five scripts in that day by for different features so that we can able to build an infrastructure which is reliable and which can be used interdependently and the other thing was shortage of competence yes, yeah I think Jeff wants me to repeat your question you are saying that we are spending one day in a month resolving the automation problems no, no, no, that is not that what Venkat said is that we are running the tech reduction day the technical debt reduction day once a month and the concentration for that day is on getting your legacy automation covered so you do about five or ten scripts depending on what the team are willing to commit for for that particular day to reduce your technical debt two weeks and it is for all backlogs that is what as an organization we have concluded that two weeks is the duration and then shortage of competencies as the moment when we move from the competencies within the pockets to a cross functional team we cannot scale up those many competencies can be available in each backlog so we definitely have a shortage so the only way what we did was we invested in a technical coach and try to see at least if we have a backlog and we need C skills at least five people Java skills we need you know ten people automation skills we need you know three people like that at least whatever the minimum can be provided we accommodate and then we see in the next six months you know by doing pair programming or test driven development or extreme programming how can we able to scale up so that we are seeing some results like some that doesn't want like a tester sometimes is interested to become a developer sometimes a tester want to be a tester only so we take that individual preferences into account and we see how we can able to scale up and inflexible software architecture this is where we have a goal that where we were releasing earlier like yearly once a launch from there we moved to two months a launch from there we want to move to two weeks and from there we want to move for one day like each day you can able to give a potential shipable increment software which can able to be there so for that if we if our current architecture code architecture doesn't support then we have to move to a modular architecture which can enable us so these are the things we have encountered and this is the way how we have dealt with that to sustain our way forward actually we need to create sufficient like external coaches were there they handovered us but then we started creating like internal we have two tracks one is on the process track and one is on the technical track we start created like internal champions who can able to like next batches who are coming they can able to you know join with them and try to see how they can able to share their knowledge and learn from them and we can improve together and our journey continues so with this actually I want to just share a quick highlight on the what are the unique things actually we think in our agile transformation we had you know got or we wanted to share with you all is Cisco has as Anil mentioned like Cisco as a escape velocity we call it as a playbook which is a kind of a framework which is the start like when I be you says I want to move to agile for my business reasons where should I start with so this is the place we go and there is a framework which is available which says you know a kind of a not mandated rules but it says this is how you can do and if you think you can adapt something and you can so that is the starting point and also another thing was like there was a strong commitment from top management to perform all agile practices so seriously the senior management has adopt like they made a decision to move agile for business reasons and their commitment is very high and we have adopted like top down training model so since the execs have been participated in creating a backlog running through the sprint you know within sprint complete the you know story they know what is the pain like a CI server is not working we created a story that they do it in five days but the story might be taken for four sprints they understand what is spill over now you know what is the cost of why the velocity is going down so these things was very well understood by them since they have you know they have travelled through the journey and it helps us and hired and appointed external coaches this is very important because in 2014 before we tried scrum scrum but whatever it is internally but once the external coaches are there they can help the blind spots within our organization structure and they can able to surface it out much quickly than within our internal things emphasis on individuals and interactions through physical scrum boards like we like individual interaction versus processes and tools this is where actually we create the complete physical scrum boards like we ask even directors to walk in rather than asking the status from a tool so that they come and the witness they can see the board in the absence of you know team or the presence of the team so that tool is there if we have a distributed you know teams to share it we use tools but otherwise predominantly we prefer with physical scrum boards yes the question was did we have co-located teams yes and like we rolled out various guilds like for product owners scrum master and team members the like minded people can able to come and they can do innovation like we have some problems like even they can able to do a creativity like my retrospectives are getting monotonous what should I do they can like like minded people are whoever has facing the problem they can form in a guild and they can do for like two months three months and they can find like different techniques like out of that we with the help of coaches or with us reading several books we can share the knowledge and the guilds can give a better outcome it could be with the process or with the technical yeah over to you Anil so this large size the challenges are not unique you would have seen it in Dhananjay's earlier presentation we've added it just to say that we got a feel of our maturity based on the sort of obstacles challenges that were rising up so when we started the journey when the transformation started we had as Venkat already showed in the previous slide lot of traditional designations and people had to be mapped to the agile roles and a test engineer would walk up and say to the manager will ask what am I going to be am I going to be a developer am I going to be a scrum master the role they were going to play and around that role where the first few problems that people managers had to face the directors the senior leadership had to face they had to explain they had to educate a lot and then once the teams were formed and they started playing you would see that the roles especially among the first few teams tend to crossover and a PO thinking that the scrum master is doing his job and the scrum master thinking the PO is taking over his job so lot of stepping on each other's tools was happening these sort of you mature from there the teams learn the practices and then learn the roles and understand the role and then they start practicing the ceremonies and there you start seeing the team struggling to have to adopt the ceremonies and to stand by the ceremonies stand-ups not happening in the 15 minutes going on and on people not coming on time for the stand-ups things like that so that takes you through the next stage of maturity and your challenges become sort of competency missing in the team so you have asked the team to become cross-functional they were focused on one area they sort of try to live in that one area and suddenly they feel that there is nobody to do the UI because they are middleware guys so these sort of are the issues and these are the next set of issues that you are going to find because you have asked the team to become cross-functional and these up till now these are the easy issues to find you with little or with a systematic investment you can sort of overcome this issue once you cross this point in your maturity in your journey you sort of hit the big problems your systemic issues your CI not being able to scale to be able to make a build in 30 minutes you have set out and saying that is my target but then it takes 4 hours and then you realize you have to overhaul your whole build system and your CI not able to run all the test cases and you get only half the test cases done in that 4 hours and you have an overnight test which sort of breaks halfway through so you find systemic issues which become obstacles for the team to not perform and it takes a lot of time to resolve these issues and a lot of investment and then you reach point where the team now is adopting the processes the team now wants to improve its velocity picks up more stories and they are not able to complete the stories and they sort of carry on the spill over the stories and not able to deliver and that's where the coaches have helped us a lot in breaking that trend and those come with as you mature further and the next set of challenge comes you find that your team has hit a level of velocity and it's not moving beyond that and that's where the engineering practices the new engineering practices that you have to adopt across the organization come into play so we just put this up so if you are doing a transformation for you to get a feel of where you are the issues and challenges that pop up sort of give a good indication as to where you are on your journey with that so yeah any questions yeah yeah thank you so I was just wondering whether obviously there's been a very very huge prioritization with the senior leadership for agile implementation was wondering if you can elaborate more on what were the triggers for that you did touch upon some initial part prioritized but any particular reason why it was prioritized so high by the senior leadership no it is because right now as I said the video market whatever if you see right now the competition whatever it we are seeing like say from youtube or from apple so if we and we are in the traditional you know viewing business through setup box from that perspective the market is shifting much faster and if we have to do with the existing way of working as we see for any new feature when a customer asks for us we think six months is the development but they are seeing on the end to end like you have operational issues and by the time it launches into the field it is taking one and a half year if we continue to do that we are the survival is going to get challenged maybe not now immediately maybe maybe later of five years or ten years down the line if you have to make a shift then you have to do a radical change and that is what actually one of the trigger where we thought how can we increase our productivity and if within the same component structure and if we do the integration and if we do in this way will it work that is the reason we question on from the organization point of view from the execution point of view and from the people point of view so and that is where in the transformation and we move forward just to add to Venkat one of the key drivers was the business driver there in that customers wanted us to release faster we as Venkat mentioned we had like a six to twelve months depending upon the complexity of the requirements given by the customer we took about six to twelve months to deliver that feature and even a critical field issue would take about three to four weeks to deliver so we had to break that pattern we had to figure out a way to deliver faster and most of the customers who have joined us in our journey have looked at this as a great positive and saying that yes we you know two weeks you are getting a shippable code we want to be part of that journey so we are facing things quicker to us we can influence the journey itself so they are part of our journey in that they see our backlogs they prioritize with us the backlogs so this was some of the key drivers for us to take this transformation Hi my question is understood that pay TV must be considering of many projects and when you guys were transforming your approach to Aiskram was it a phase movement for some of the projects and others will follow or it was you know on a one single date all those projects that is where I showed you the batches like we created like one of the program we call it as evolution for that we were around 550 people were there and we have these many like 47 customer base was there so for that we created batches and each batch we slowly started with the higher priority customers which we need which doesn't have an impact on the immediate release plan so those homeworks were been done and the batches were been rolled out so like we started this journey somewhere around like last year march and we are right now in the sixth batch which we just finished the you know them onboarding onto the agile and we expect that by Q3 we complete all the you know batches so it was like a one year course of time or one to one like four to five backlogs it may have one feature, one product and two customer projects, something like that that is how we prioritize based on the without impacting the existing business and not impacting on the revenue that is how we have derived the plan Thank you How did you eliminate the integration so I mean yes I understand that components needed to be integrated together that's why you had an explicit integration team but with features also there needs a lot of integration between the features right so how did you completely eliminate that I'll take it so I'll give you an example I was part of way one and I handled as a product owner one of our profiles and the first thing that we did was to make stories vertical stories so the teams that picked up would deliver everything from the UI all the way down to the functionality and they were responsible for integrating it and delivering it on the main trunk so earlier what would happen is that you would have a UI team do the UI part I understand that so my point was mostly on the features so there is a feature one and feature two these features also need to be integrated interacting with each other at some point in time so how were we doing that that's part of your design first you decide a feature which is vertical feature you slice it up into stories that are vertical and can be delivered and deliver value and then as part of your grooming with your leadership so the leadership has the architect also involved in your team leadership one of the criteria is to see how you interact with other features and you sort of write your acceptance criteria to cover that interaction so it was being handled within the sprints it's not outside the sprints so if that particular feature have dependency on other vertical like feature delivering other vertical then how that was handled so we have the CI infrastructure that when get mentioned the test cases that go into it essentially are for the main features we have so if your team is delivering something into the main trunk there are automated test cases on the CI that we have built which will test the code for the sanity of the other features and that particular feature let me say only one customer has a feature and that platform is added to the CI infrastructure in such a way that when you deliver your feature or team may delivers it it doesn't break that particular feature which is only available for one customer that is from regression perspective but from the delivery perspective or the development perspective itself if you have dependency may I add go ahead so here say for example before it goes to the scrum team the product owner and architect and end to end architect they will groom the feature so granularly that within two weeks duration you can create a vertical slice which is demovable like one test scenario of that feature A with all the dependencies identified the grooming has to be applied first and in the grooming the dependencies will be identified like how many platforms should I execute it has relation with middleware or UI what are the dependencies are there so those dependencies should be identified and see that this backlog and the like if you have two scrum teams three scrum teams do they have the competency and by evaluating that they create the acceptance criteria in such a way that either I create a stub or a mock so that I can able to fulfill the functionality so that if that is going to take time that story will come like I do a part A of the story A.1 when they do it when the component is available that scrum team will take the response by removing the stub integrating it and doing the regression and performing it so that whoever the scrum team takes they are going to add delta on top of that so that is how one of the way it can be done when you moved from component teams to feature teams one of the major shifts is multiple feature teams touching the same component which is entirely different from a set of people touching the same set of components in the earlier days so this poses a lot of threat towards the architecture being kept intact so was it a situation for you how did you manage it so I think you saw my slides on the moderators I am just going there only on the moderators you saw it so that was one of the beginning of our journey that is one thing we realized in that we had experts at component level when we asked the teams to become cross functional we still had only experts at the component level right so we had a moderates the first thing we did was to make a guild of moderators because it from day one we couldn't have a vertical moderator so it was almost a guild which each scrum team would approach and say I am building this vertical feature I need a commitment from the guild to review this code and make sure the sanity is there and over time lot of this moderators who are part of that original guild are now vertical moderators which means you don't need two or three people reviewing your code your vertical code you can now have experts who can for the for that feature be the single point of moderation it is like an open source model your main trunk is open to all 550 developers who can check in and check out the code but once they check in gatekeeper who is having the component expertise earlier in pocket is since he is either part of the scrum team or he is part of any one of the scrum team so he becomes the gatekeeper for that feature area whichever the code comes he owns that so he gives his you know review comments on top of that unless until that is not in sync the developer cannot be able to complete the another way of working is when the developer goes into the sprint planning if he thinks this is the feature area I am going to get because in the look ahead we submit this then he calls that moderator into the planning meeting have a conversation with him when he bringing the tasks so that he is the moderator is involved from the day one before he writes the one line of the code so that within the sprint duration it helps him to because he has already said this is the approach I am going to follow and there is a mutual agreement about that day what happens is the review becomes faster so that he does not on the day five, day six when he submits the review time is like maybe half an hour or two hours they close the review so that within the sprint that story can be delivered I had a question on the product owner transformation right what is the how did you approach the overall product owner transformation because that is something which I have seen as a challenge in the past when you move from traditional teams into scrum product owners being central to the velocity of the teams right so could you please speak through that it's something that we didn't cover here so I had personally a very interesting journey I was part of wave one as a product owner currently I am a product manager so with your scrum agile your product owner interaction with the team is quite evident we have in our organization a separate product management organization I as a product manager interact with product owners okay so I define the portfolio take a particular set of box portfolio I would define the requirements that the market are demanding I would write the high level business epics then I sit with the product owner and we detail out the stories user stories at a high level that map onto this business epic we prioritize that I take back that user stories as what we call the agile commit and we go into the approval process saying this is what on behalf of the team I am bringing forward what I as a product manager and the product owner have sat together and agreed upon as what is going to go in as the prioritized list for that particular agile commit so that's the way we work the tool we are using today for our stories is rally I have one question thanks to both of you for sharing this experience you have the continuous integration build and finally when the build is ready how much time typically do you spend after that do you spend any time first of all on any of the manual testing how much time do you spend I will take that right now as currently our infrastructure say for example the product whatever I am working has 1700 test cases which need to be executed to get the confidence that it is good to go and deliver and deploy now the duration first thing is we didn't have enough automation infrastructure yet where the 1700 can be executed but at least the P1s whatever are there so that we want to ensure that regression is not in place so within 4 hours that execution completes beyond that what we take is we may spend like in the sprint that we have a test strategy how we planned was the CI gives us so we take day 1's baseline and we do a testing we know what are the check-ins actually went in then day 5 we change the build so that we do only the delta testing so that what happened is this entire 1700 test cases are been executed across 10 days from day 1 so that what happens is by day 9 when we come we know this is the delta which needs to be executed and we execute that and we deliver it that is how we have arranged so you can say the test effort required to execute that 1700 is spread across like in the form of 3 or 4 user stories across 10 days I have one leading question to this one may ask question is that let's suppose this is more from your more forecasting approach but let's suppose you are in a situation where you are having every infrastructure everything ready based on your experience still how much manual testing is required your experience to me if you have a robust automation infrastructure which can give you feedback maybe in like when I am doing a check-in if I can get one hour all the test execution completes I think you have to do only kind of if you have any acceptance test which you have agreed with your customer you should execute it and you should deliver it that's all and thanks for Agile India 2015 for giving this platform to us and thank you all and paying attention to our conversation and I really enjoyed it thank you


My three small steps were getting involved with, number one, the Society of Black Engineers and the National Society of Black Engineers here at Purdue. It really was the source of my becoming and understanding who I was, both personally and professionally. The next step was taking advantage of a scholarship that had been given by General Motors. Not only paid for the second half of my undergraduate career, but also paid for my graduate school at the University of Chicago in business. So it really was leveraging that opportunity and at the same time while spending time at General Motors, I took advantage of everything in terms of professional development, in terms of moving my career along, whether it was coursework, whether it was classes, whether it was seminars. I took advantage of every opportunity to develop myself personally and professionally. I think the last step was, and actually my giant leap, I believe, was actually leaving General Motors and taking a job out on the East Coast, doing something very different than I had done during my career at General Motors. It was a big step. It was a long way from what I knew, but, you know, living on the East Coast was valuable for me just from a career standpoint, but just from a personal standpoint, knowing that I could take giant leaps and I could handle it. My name is Angela Threlkel Dodd. I graduated from the School of Industrial Engineering in 1983. I am a Purdue engineer.


Good afternoon and welcome to the Justice Subcomittee on Policing's third meeting of 2018. We have no apologies. Agenda item 1 is the decision on taking business and private. That's item 3, which is discussion on the subcommittee's work programme in private. Are we all agreed about that? Agenda item 2, counter corruption unit. On an extended item is an evidence session on Durham Constabulary's reports on Police Scotland's counter-corruption unit. I refer members to paper one, which is a note by the clerk, and paper two, which is a private paper. I welcome Michael Barton, chief constable, and Darren Ellis, senior investigator, Darren Stabley. Thank you for travelling to see us. I would invite you, chief constable, to make some opening remarks, if you wish to please. Thank you very much, convener, and thank you very much for your invitation to us both to come. This isn't the first time, of course, we've been in Scotland because we were up for seven months on our investigation. The reason why I wrote to you as a committee was I read the transcript of a previous hearing that you'd had in relation to this, and I felt that some of the evidence that was given to you needed to be corrected. Okie doke. Well, your report and others have generated a considerable amount of paper, and there's a lot of very detailed information in there. Can I ask First and Formos, Mr Barton, about your terms of reference? Do you believe there was clarity about that? Oh, sorry, it was read, so I'm going to ask Darren to follow up on what I say. I was called by the chief constable, chief constable Gormley, and asked to do an inquiry. It was going to be in two parts. First of all, to do an independent investigation, as described by the IPT, so Police Scotland, the law department, Police Scotland had undertaken to the IPT in London that they would conduct an independent investigation because the authorities that had been gained within the counter-corruption unit were deemed to be unlawful by the IPT. I agreed to do that. The other part of the investigation was to review a number of cases that the counter-corruption unit had actually been part of. When I scoped that part of the inquiry, I realised that that was just going to be too much for—it would have been inordinate for—Durham to do all of their business, as well as both sides of that inquiry. I asked the chief constable of Northumbria, with chief constable Gormley's agreement, that they would actually do that part of the inquiry. When I was given the inquiry, it was very clear to me from the chief constable that we would be asked to do an investigation, which means that we can investigate, we have access to all the documents and we can interview people so that we can then make a recommendation on whether or not there may be misconduct. Of course, all the way through any inquiry like this, we have got to be cognisant that there may be criminal matters that are revealed. We were satisfied, by the way, all the way through this, that there were no criminal matters that needed to be referred, but that is always something that we have in the back of our mind. What emerged when we were doing our inquiry was that we were then told that this is not an investigation, this is an inquiry, and that is where I became a little bit confused and a little bit concerned. Have I got that right, Darren? Yes, sir. In terms of reference, what struck me, while the terms of reference for ear piece of work were eminently clear, the chronology of this thing, without getting too detailed for you, is that an eye-occur inspection in June 15 identified what was further, which later deemed to be unlawful, which was reported on a month later and in more detail, in the November 15. The four adversely affected people, as termed by the Investigatory Power Tribunal process, were in themselves complainants. Let's not lose sight of the fact that, at that particular time, two of the four were serving members of Police Scotland. Those people did not provide a complaint statement until February 2016, but were clear to say that the Investigatory Power Tribunal process was to ensue, so they didn't know what they didn't know. Those individuals, one could argue, perhaps weren't engaged with, and Matt has explained that, in any great detail, with any great haste, they really didn't know the position until the IPT in August was actually clear. That led to my staff having to re-engage with the complainant and said that juncture to find out what it is that they were concerned about and to determine the length and breadth of the work that needed to be done. That was done subsequently to any terms of reference. In short, the terms of reference were set far too early, because let's not forget that work that we were required to do was an undertaking on behalf of Police Scotland to the IPT to fulfil an independent investigation. Secondly, we have four complainants here who need to be engaged with, re-issued and satisfied and answers given. The terms of reference, I would argue, were set far too early. It seems to be a pivotal part of this. The relationship between any misconduct, discipline, call it what you will—I'm not sure what it would be called south of the border—and criminal matters would again be pivotal, because it would be clear and important for individuals who you did see to understand their status—are they a witness, a suspect or accused, things like that? Was there no clarity given around those aspects in the initial brief, or how were you initially advised? I was initially asked to conduct an investigation, and that's what I agreed with Thill Gormley. Subsequent to that, the professional standards department in Police Scotland decided that we should only conduct an inquiry. I argued with them all the way through. I should be allowed to do an investigation because that's the commitment that Police Scotland had given to the IPT, and I was never allowed to do an investigation. We were not allowed to have the investigation status, which allows us to speak to officers who may or may not have been guilty of misconduct but are certainly pivotal for us to speak to under caution. I don't wish to labour the point. There's various legislation underpins. Criminal matters are at the behest of Crown Office Brokerator Fiscal Service. Misconduct matters are at the behest of the Deputy Chief Constable. Was there any discussion around the parameters? I mean, poep? It's unsaid. I can't be clear whether or not we had a specific agreement. That would have been an unspoken agreement. I do lots of inquiries into other forces, and it's an unspoken agreement that, when we're conducting misconduct matters, if we reveal criminality in that inquiry, there will be an immediate discussion with the relevant law officers in Scotland, the relevant CPS or Chief Constable in England. That was not a problem. I was not concerned, Mr Convener, at all about that component of our terms of reference, on the criminality side at all. I don't know if that's been helpful there. It seems to hinge on the initial contact, and that's what I'm trying to bury down on. I don't think that it's unreasonable for a chief constable to be asked to investigate to assume that it is what the layperson assumes to be an investigation, but I'm trying to link it in to the investigative powers, what their expectation was, and whether Chief Constable Gormley was asking you to deliver their expectation, rather than an inquiry that may encompass misconduct and criminality. As far as I was concerned, I was asked to investigate. As far as I'm concerned, I agree with you. That's what the common man or woman would agree, would understand what an investigation is. That's what I wanted to do, and I was prevented from doing so. Finally, because there's a number of questions, was there the terms of reference in writing? Yes, but I referred to my point earlier that the terms of reference, which may have arrived in August and September of 2016, at that point, we hadn't engaged with the complainants, so I agree with Mr Bowden. The independent investigation for Mr Gormley, I would guess as a direct result of the wording provided by the IPT, but remember the issue with respect, sir. As part of that process, you also had four individuals who quite distinctly had made complaints to Police Scotland, so our investigation was to cover the need of the IPT process and the undertaking given by Police Scotland and to satisfy four individuals who were making, because they were entitled to do, police complaints to Police Scotland. Chief Constable, you said when you initially looked at what you were being asked to do that it was beyond what you felt Durham could undertake, and hence Northumberland was brought to the table. I just want to ask the very simple question whether, as a result of dividing the task in that way, there were any downsides to that division having taken place, and I hope to hear the answers now. You won't be disappointed. None whatsoever, that's why we divided it. In fact, if we'd kept both, there would have been confusion, because what we gave Northumbria was a review of everything that was completely disconnected to this inquiry. We kept everything that was connected to this inquiry, and the two were completely separate tasks anyway. When Phil Gomley first spoke to me, we did have that discussion that one was a really big task. Northumbria is a force that's more than twice my size, and after a bit of cajoling they agreed that they should take that. It was not seriously a small undertaking taken by Northumbria. The two forces undertaking this work would have talked to each other if what they were doing revealed the need to do so. We kept in touch, but I don't think that we found anything that strictly overlapped at all. I'm just looking at the quote towards the end of the report to the SPA, where you say that the findings have been reached on the basis that the alleged conduct occurred without any influence or participation from any officer of an executive rank. However, in reaching that conclusion, the SPA must also consider the restricted working environment that Durham has operated within, as articulated in the lessons learned chapter. In particular, the fact that Durham has not been able to fully investigate the conduct of the officers within the CCU by means of an unfettered misconduct investigation. It almost begs the question with that level of concern whether, in producing the report, you've legitimised a process in which you don't appear to have full confidence. Does that be a fair characterisation? What was clear to me when we started on this process when we first made contact to the four people who've been deeply wronged was that we had to try and bring fairness and justice to their position. My position at the start and remains—I've articulated this to the Deputy Chief Constable as well as the Chief Superintendent—is that, if they'd allowed me to do an independent investigation, I could have brought an end to this much sooner and much more effectively for the four complainants, because, of course, it still isn't over. Although I was frustrated, it was clear that Police Scotland—ironiously, I believe—felt that I had to go through this part of the process, an inquiry for them subsequently to launch an independent investigation. What, in effect, they were doing was putting me as an interim investigator for them to be an independent investigation thereafter. I did point out to them on more than one occasion, I felt myself sufficiently independent. It's instructive, I think, in the evidence that was given to you last time to try and answer that question, Mr MacArthur. There was a question put to Chief Superintendent Spears about people who deal with misconduct, who can't deal with complaints, and there's a real separation from all of these issues that's currently the interpretation in Police Scotland. I think that they're wrong. So Mr Spears said, you cannot have any previous involvement in any complaint handling to run an investigation. That is wrong. That is not what the regulations say. The regulations say three things as to my status. Then I can do any investigation. One, I'm a rank above the officers that have been investigated. I fulfil that criterion. That I've got the appropriate skills and experience, that's for others to judge. The third one is that I act impartially. That's it. So this false, in my view, separation between complaints and misconduct, and Police Scotland do this all the time, all it serves to do is lengthen the process. The way that I would have dealt with this, when Police Scotland was first alerted to this, it was by Iocca. Iocca governed me too. They governed the entire country. And this is a real important day for me. This is High Court judge coming into my organisation and looking at the secret stuff that I do. So I've got to be on my best behaviour and I am prepared for that meeting. And generally, we get a clean bill of health. There are sometimes minor recommendations to make. The Iocca report that Police Scotland got in 2015, June 2015, was excoriating. They were told that people had acted illegally and they then got their report in July. So they were given a verbal report in June, report in July. Even though there were two serving officers then and two retired officers, those officers, even though they were in jeopardy and had been wronged, Police Scotland didn't contact them. Then that report was published in November. Then the four officers who were wronged were then written to, but in a very regimented way, by the Iocca, as a result of the Iocca report, not from Police Scotland. They were told that they were in jeopardy and they were all perplexed. Still no report, still no contact from Police Scotland, even though Police Scotland employed two of those people. So then, in February, I think, there was then a complaint and that was the first, as far as I can make out, the first contact made by Police Scotland to these four people, bearing in mind they'd been told that they'd acted unlawfully the previous June. So the way that I would have dealt with it, and I need to put this in context just to, because I think this meeting is just, it's necessary, but it's such a pity that we're here. So in June, if I had got that report then from the High Court judge, I would have said, right, we need to put this right now. So I would have immediately made sure that the counter-corruption unit was fit for purpose. So if I felt that some people needed training or needed to be investigated, if they needed to be investigated they would have been deployed elsewhere.  And those four people would have been approached and we would have reassured them that everything that we'd obtained illegally was destroyed forthwith. That still hasn't been destroyed so I got a letter last week from Police Scotland asking me to oversee the destruction of the stuff that was obtained illegally in 2015. Now if that had happened then we wouldn't have been where we are. So I've had four complainants, now one who is serving and just to name him, that's Sergeant Stephen Adams and he has been gravely wronged and remains gravely wronged. So we've got... Mr Barton, sorry to interrupt you. I think we have to go with the report here. It would probably be helpful not to mention individuals please. Okay. That's fine. Can I seek clarification from the clerks just what we can and can't say? Police Scotland, for example, is an inanimate object. When we're talking about Police Scotland, a single force, what are we talking about here? This is the police force under investigation and I think we have to drill down about who has blocked, as I understand it, Mr Barton, the investigation that you thought you could fully carry out but were not allowed to do so. If I can clarify from the clerks, I'm very keen that we thoroughly look at this. We have a lot of communications you're aware of, Margaret, which suggests that there are still life proceedings, so it is that that is at the back of my mind when we talk about the individual officers. I'm not trying to fetter your explanation of the whole circumstance. Mr Combeena, I have absolutely no intention of naming any officers who may or may not be in jeopardy. Absolutely not. That would be incorrect of me and that could jeopardise further proceedings. I will not do that. However, it is a matter of public record the names of the four people who are wronged. It's named in the IOCRA report, it's named in the IPT report and it's named in the HMI, all of which are in the public domain. I'm simply repeating things that are in the public domain, so I have no intention, Mr Combeena, of embarrassing you at all. No, no, it's not about embarrassing. Sorry, I meant legally embarrassing. Yes, so we have four people who are gravely wronged and continue to be gravely wronged. The problem that we have when we're dealing with those four people is every time we go and see them again, they feel that there is more conspiratorial activity by Police Scotland. I can understand why, because they're not getting to the end of it all. I've got to say, I try and reassure them, there isn't any conspiracy in Police Scotland. This is ineptitude and in my view, and there's certainly not a conspiracy just to reassure the committee. However, because this has carried on for so long, we've got four complainants, one of whom still works for the organisation, who feel that the organisation is ganging up on them. As a result of that, every time we see them, there are more allegations that we had to field throughout our inquiry. I'm simply trying to point out to you that Police Scotland's aim is to be speedy around all this. Their current interpretation of the rules in which they work are, I think, wrong and don't serve anybody. Officers are waiting for years to get an adjudication and complainants are waiting years to get satisfaction. On that point, and it is the interpretation of the regulations, Police Scotland sought Queen's Council's opinion and shared it with you. I saw it. In my legal opinion, it was exactly what I thought it would be. I have a law degree. I read the regulations. I interpreted them. What's happened is Police Scotland has created a policy on top of the regulations. They're not working to the regulations, Mr Convener. They're working to their policy that they've written after the regulations and they don't carry the force of regulation. The regulations are clear. I've explained what it is—three things that I need to be able to conduct in investigation. I don't know whether I'm going to be unhelpful here, Mr Convener, but the way that it's misinterpreting now is that Police Scotland has separated complaints from misconduct. When a member of the public complains to Police Scotland, that's investigated. When that's finished, or there might be misconduct here, they push it into the misconduct line. They say to the complainant, it's all done and dusted now. That's it. Your complaint's been dealt with. The complainant then says, I don't know what's happening with the misconduct. That's nothing to do with you. That's completely separate. That's wrong. If a complainant complains about something in my organisation, they should stay with it all the way through. We should be absolutely keeping them informed, so much so that they could be invited to the hearing if there is one, and certainly they would be informed what the result is. Let's say the result is that it's not misconduct, but we've gone into the misconduct rule in my force, then we would say, we wouldn't name them, this officer has got to, I mean the complainant wouldn't know who they were, but this officer has got to have management advice, this person has got to go on a training course and at the end of the training course, years later, a year later, we would then inform the complainant that that's exactly what we've done. That isn't what happens in Scotland. Once the complainant is deemed to be closed by Police Scotland, that's it. The complainant is pretty much set free and then the misconduct happens completely separately and not transparently. Keith Brown, thank you for that. There are a number of questions. Rona Mackayl. Yes, I said just that. Chief Constable Barton, when you were told that it wasn't an investigation, it was to be an inquiry, how much time elapsed between you thinking it was an investigation and then being told it was an inquiry? A couple of months, sir. Sorry, can you just repeat the question? How much time elapsed between you being thinking you were about to conduct an investigation and then subsequently being told it was an inquiry? It was two to three months, yeah. We started, the team and I started in earnest in early December, yeah. With any investigation, the initial stages of that was to clear the ground, gain understanding, obtain documents, speak to witnesses, not vulnerable witnesses who could help with the picture and then the dialogue started with Police Scotland. So you actually had a chance to start the investigation as you thought it was going to be? Absolutely. The difference between inquiry investigation, I mean there are one or two nuances, but the main one is to help you, is we can't interview officers under caution. So if we spoke to the officers who might be at risk, whatever they said to us could never be used in a subsequent investigation, which seemed to me bizarre. So there was no point of speaking to the officers because whatever they said to us wouldn't be helpful to the person who subsequently took over my inquiry. So that's the main difference. I'm just glad there's a small question. In your experience, has this ever happened to you before? Or was this something in time? This is a novel experience for me. Okay, thank you. Perhaps I could ask, you've said that it's in an epitode rather than anything more serious, which is comforting at this stage of that sort of conclusion. But can I ask if you think some of this in the epitode has come as a result of having a single force, a single force that is under review because of what's happened, and do you think it was appropriate therefore, given that the single force was under review, that it was then the arperture setting the policy and then determining that you couldn't continue with the investigation that you were only looking at complaints and therefore couldn't look at conduct? My interpretation of what happened in terms of they asked me to do an inquiry rather than an investigation, I can't comment on whether or not that's because there's a single force or not. That hasn't crossed my mind quite frankly. I was dealing with what I was dealing with. But I'm thinking about your question now. I think there was a lack of openness in certain parts of the organisation and remain so, certainly in the legal department. So when we conducted our inquiry, we wanted to look at everything. When we were looking at the senior officers, we needed to see the email change between people before they came here to see whether there was any conspiracy about people not coming here and telling you the truth. We were told that we couldn't see those emails. The way that the legal officers in Police Scotland interpreted legal privilege, we never asked to see the legally privileged documents where a solicitor or a lawyer advises their client. It's legitimate for a senior police officer or anyone, member of the Federation, to sit down with their solicitor and to be absolutely sure that those conversations are sacrosanct. I don't want to breach that. The way that the law officers in Police Scotland misinterpreted that was, anything that a senior officer did as a result of that meeting they deemed to be legally privileged, which is clearly nonsense.  Another arm pass was that we wanted to speak to senior officers who had retired. The inquiry wanted us to do that. Police Scotland wanted us to do that. Lawyers in Police Scotland said that we weren't allowed to know where they lived because it was data protection. We asked them very politely how the devil we were going to get in touch with them. Eventually, after another two months, we actually got the details and we were able to go and see those people. In answer to your question, I think that currently the lawyers in Police Scotland are not transparent and they're overly defensive and they are risk averse and it got in my way. Whether that has to do with being one police force or not, I cannot say. It certainly chimes in with concerns that some of us have had since the inception of Police Scotland. The checks and balances weren't there to ensure the necessary accountability, transparency and openness. It seems to me that there's a conflict of interest here if the organisation under investigation can block the passing over of information. Can you comment on the Northumbrian report? I haven't seen that. I know that if they haven't sent it, then it's pretty much sent. If you reached any conclusions about the culture within the organisation, because the Northumbrian report certainly had contracts on that, if I could read it out to you within Police Scotland and unlike complaint processes in England, officers subject to an investigation by Police Scotland, PSD and Stroke CCU often result in a counter-allegation made against those officers who are conducting the investigation. It is unclear whether that is orchestrated by individuals or whether they are coerced into the course of action by legal representatives of federation or peers, but that appears to be the immediate response following any executive action taken as part of the CCU-PSD investigations. My comment on that, Darren may come in after me on this one, because he's closer to some of the detail, but what you're describing there for me, Ms Mitchell, is a culture. The reason why I would put it full on my sword very smartly in any situation like this, and I follow my sword genuinely, is organisations need to have humility, especially when the police forces, because they've got power. We wield power on behalf of our communities and our states, and it's crucial that we exercise that with humility. So I follow my sword really quickly. That's why I know what I would have done in this case. Darren, my former head of professional standards, would have come in and he would have looked grave, and it would have been clear to me within five minutes what I would have to do, and that is after the foreing and profusely apologise. When that doesn't happen, it permeates an organisation. So individually, there's some smashing people in Police Scotland. Everybody we met, smashing people, I've got to say, I've got dreadfully crossed with the legal people and the PSD people, because I think they misinterpreted the rules, quite frankly, and the two risk averse. There's still smashing people, but the culture. So what was instructive in the evidence that you were given by Mr Spears? He said, when I think one of you asked what were the four complainants like, and said, oh well we've sort of subcontracted that to Durham, and Durham are really in touch with them, and they're looking after them. Well yes we are, but only by default. That should have been done by Police Scotland. That should have been really clear from day one, and that's why I think the serving officer who continues to have a grave injustice inflicted upon him. Can I just ask finally, you said in your opening statement that there was information given to the committee that needed to be corrected. Has that now been corrected? No. Okay, good. You perhaps elaborate on what that was. Thank you. I'm now going to take you through the transcript if you would mind. At the top of page 6, top right, at the end of the paragraph, it talks about the process seems to have been complicated and somewhat protracted. I want to really emphasise to you that's because of the decisions that I've just described, the way that risk averse decisions were made. But I do agree with the convener at the time who suggested that it didn't need to be. So I also disagree that complaints and conduct are two separate matters in the conduct regulations. They're not. That's just how they have been misinterpreted. Also Police Scotland's intention was to publish a redacted version. I have sent you an unredacted version of both reports and I sent them before the end of the year. As the report's author, the handling codes on that particular document gave me the right to do that. Halfway down page 7 on the left-hand side, Chief Superintendent Spears said, it would probably be unfair for me to go into the finer details because that in itself would probably identify those officers. Those officers are already named. They're already named in three separate published reports. Then at the top of page 8 on the right-hand side, the report becoming public would prejudice the investigation, but the matters looked into were already in the public domain. All of that was in the IPT, the IOCRA review and the HMICS report. All of that is when people say that they want to be open and transparent, everything that they're doing and saying militates against that. On the bottom of page 8 on the right-hand side, Chief Superintendent Spears said, it would be incredibly unfair of the officers who were subject to the inquiry at this time. He's got that wrong. It's incredibly unfair to the four complainants and actually the length of this is incredibly unfair to the officers. So it's that secrecy, that lack of transparency that is incredibly unfair to everybody because there isn't speedy justice. Chief Superintendent Spears at the bottom of page 9 on the left-hand side, he says the redaction will largely be in the Durham report and will relate to very personal information. He then goes on at the bottom of page 13 on the left-hand side in response to your question, Ms Mackay, that he says, it goes into fine detail, my report, about the officers. Their ages, I've never mentioned anybody's age, their postings, their relevant postings, were they in the CCU or were they part of the murder inquiry or neither? And a whole raft of other details, well forgive me, there were no raft of other details, there were no ages and I simply named the officers where they worked and that information was drawn from three reports in the public domain. Chief Superintendent Spears on the top of page 14 on the right-hand side then says, that is a good question, I will be honest with you that the report is written in Durham style, there's an implication there that bless me, I've created a Durham style that's not quite up to snuff in Scotland, I absolutely disagree with that judgement. When we asked that force to do an investigation and provide a report, we accepted the report in the format that it was provided, I gave the force guidance on the normal approach that police Scotland anticipated, but I am working with the report that Durham submitted to us. The implication there is he told us exactly how he wanted his report and we failed to comply. He gave us, and I've supplied this to you, a one sheet of paper with Police Scotland heading on it, that was it. What's really instructive is that as a result of my report, by the way I've done quite a few of those, and the most important part of that report is lessons learned. That wasn't part of any template that we were given. What's really instructive, because we spoke to Police Service of Northern Ireland, we had to, because they took over the inquiry from them, we had to brief them. They were told by Police Scotland, by Mr Spears department, to follow our report structure because they found it helpful. On page 19, you asked about suspension. I never spoke to anybody about suspension. It was never raised with me and I didn't offer an opinion. That was not within my brief, but since it's been mentioned there and there was an implication that we were part of it, I will say this. I don't think those officers in the CCU should have continued in the CCU after that decision was made by IOCA. I'm going back now to June 2015. I think there may be one more page. I'm sorry for going on, Mr Convenience. It's more of a comment about the timeliness. I moved at pace here, and the only times that we paused were when we were asking for preliminary assessments. At any time in our report, they could have done a preliminary assessment. If they had done a preliminary assessment in the professional standards department, they could have switched it even under their arcane rules into an investigation and chose not to do that. We gave them ample opportunity on a number of occasions to switch it into a full investigation. We were balked to speak to some people because we weren't given those addresses and we were balked because we weren't allowed to see what were assessed to be legally privileged documents that weren't. I just wanted to comment on timeliness. That's been very helpful to get all of that on the record, Mr Bartner's number. It's also important to put on the record that, as the unredacted reports were Police Scotland and the SPA's reports, the sub-committee was unable to publish those. As you'll be aware, we publish all documentation in advance of meetings, and members are not able to refer to those particular reports. Daniel, I think that you're next. Thank you. I'll just begin by clarifying. It sounds to me as if there's two fundamental issues here. One was the timing of the setting of the scope of your work, which, in my understanding, is essentially because the complainants hadn't had the opportunity to come forward at that point. Is that correct? Second is the interpretation of regulations. You're essentially saying that there's the same regulations that apply to all forces across the UK, but Police Scotland has interpreted them in a different way. That's not true. There are different regulations in Scotland, but essentially the main difference is that police officers in Police Scotland can make a complaint, as if they were a member of the public, and police officers in England and Wales can't do that. On how that then gets pursued, you're saying that, essentially, there should be no difference. Are there after? When I saw the regulations, I was entirely comfortable with them, because that's what I'd worked with all the time in England and Wales. When I saw those three rules so that I could do an independent investigation, that was fine by me. In turn, however it's been wrapped up in procedure and policy thereafter within Police Scotland, that's where I think the problems have started. Again, by way of clarification, you've referred a number of times that you've done a number of those investigations in the past across a number of different forces in the rest of the UK. Could you just give us some sort of understanding of how many that is and, therefore, how unique your experience in Scotland has been? Well, I'm conducting some quite confidential inquiries at the moment, but I do inquire into other countries as well, so this is not something where I've just inquired into England and Wales matters. I inquire into other countries as well, but I'm not at liberty to explain that. However, all I can say is that I was flummoxed as to the misinterpretation in my view of how we should proceed. If I could help with that, Mr Johnson, as the head of PSD for seven years, it would run into dozens, and no, I've never been confronted with this issue. Just to add clarity to the point around, because Durham picked up four adversely affected disillusioned people who had not been given the respect and the values of Police Scotland of integrity, fairness and respect, well, keep looking if any of those three elements shine through in this plot, but because they hadn't had the respect of an explanation given to them, misunderstandings and myths had built upon, so, yes, I could understand your driving down the terms of reference, but outwith Durham conduct an independent investigation, what is it that we needed in further detail and an investigation which started? The four individuals themselves didn't really understand it, so for the terms of reference to be meaningful, they needed to be pliable and flexible enough to meet the needs of the four complainants, notwithstanding for the IPT process to meet their statutory responsibility, and this has been shared with Police Scotland, they have to oversee an effective remedy. The effective remedy, as written down in the order, is an investigation upon which reasonable decisions would be made. It's still yet to be decided from the IPT's perspective and the complainants have spoken with the IPT as to whether they feel that the process adopted by Police Scotland does actually meet their needs. I think that this is a really critical point there for it. When I hear your differences of opinion with Mr Spears' evidence, I hear what you're saying about the legal department in terms of the way that they interpret their regulations. Do you think that the source of the issues around the way that Police Scotland interpreted or implemented processes around the regulations is limited to the legal department? Does that extend beyond that? To what extent do you think that there is a responsibility on senior officers to make sure that their legal processes are fit for purpose in terms of serving the interests of their officers and their force? I have a great deal of sympathy for the chief officers of Police Scotland, because it is more what they have received than they have designed. I think that it started from an overcautious approach. My impression is that the unions, unison, federation and supers have said that they are going to work in that. I think that it has become an overly protracted process. I understand that there have been a number of judicial reviews that the Police Federation in Scotland have taken against the force. That tends to create polarised opinions on those things. In my opinion, the only way that you can make those regulations breathe and work so that people can feel that fairness is there is for there to be co-operation on all sides. I do not think that it is principally or exclusively the legal department, although I have got to say that I got quite cross at times with the way that they were dealing with our reasonable requests for information. However, I think that it has grown. It has grown like topsy, and people have added a little word there and a little word there. For example, the policy.  That is the guide. Can you find the policy? I think that this will help you in understanding how things have grown. The misconduct investigation is part 2, and this is the conduct regs from 2014. It is 10 subparagraph 5. An investigator appointed under paragraph 4A must be a constable of a higher rank than the constable being investigated and have the necessary knowledge, skills and expertise to plan and manage the misconduct investigation in relation to which the appointment is made. Subparagraph 6 is that the deputy chief constable must not appoint an investigator at any constable whose appointment could give rise to a reasonable concern as to whether that constable could act impartially in relation to the misconduct investigation. If somebody does a preliminary inquiry and has a look at something, could they be impartial for the second half? I will tell you what. We will build in so that the first person who does the inquiry cannot do the investigation, then we are bomb proof on that. Instead of taking a very pragmatic view of that, I mean goodness me, I do not know any of the protagonists in this inquiry other than Mr Gormley when I entered into this. I have got to be seen as impartial, and yet I was not deemed impartial because Police Scotland concentrated on the rule that they had created over and above the regs, which was if you did the inquiry, you cannot do the investigation. Does that answer that one? It does. Can I ask one final question, which is this? It is very clear to me that you found that legal department to put stumbling blocks in your way. Did you experience any other blockages or impediments from other people within Police Scotland as you tried to do your work at all? One I see is a significant issue. There is an expectation, a respect of which legislation you are speaking about, about which conduct or complaint regulation you are using, be it England, Mason or Scotland, that on receipt of whatever the complaint looks like an assessment is conducted, what is called a preliminary assessment. By way of discussion, that preliminary assessment has never been carried out in this investigation. I was told initially that one had been completed, then I was told one hadn't been completed, then I was told one had been completed and lost, then I was told one hadn't been completed. Over a period of perhaps six to eight weeks, when it's not so much about the terms of reference, what I was trying to identify is what's the starting point and what to Police Scotland consider, the four complainants views and the IPT views, an assessment of that, which would dictate the play that was never done, or I don't believe that it was ever done, but we don't know. Running alongside some of the reasons for delay, add that one in as well, so it was a really difficult position because I didn't really have a starting point. Thank you. Mr Ells, would there be, for instance, correspondence regarding that particular aspect, email exchanges? No, there isn't. To my knowledge, there isn't. I'm only led to believe and to follow the last instruction, the last instruction was, after a degree of searching and consultation and engagement with key members of staff, that a preliminary assessment, which is a fairly significant piece of work, is required even in a complaint at the lowest level of which that isn't, because, as we know, that was described as serious, unlawful and in need of an independent investigation by the IPT. For a preliminary assessment to be absent is of surprise and concern. I wonder, with respect to the concerns that you have had, at various stages, you have referred to ineptitude within Police Scotland, a culture of secrecy, risk aversion and a number of other concerns, and you have evidenced why you have come to those conclusions. Did you at any stage have conversations with the former chief constable or, more recently, have you had conversations with DCC Livingston about those concerns, recognising that you appear to have come up against various impasses at various stages with the legal department and others? Can I name the two chief officers that I've spoken to? I've not spoken to Mr Livingston about it because Mr Livingston isn't part of this. So, in terms of the decision making, it's DCC, if it's Patrick, that I've been speaking to. I spoke to Mr Gormley when he first rang me and then, because he's chief constable, I wouldn't expect to speak to him at all after that. However, when I was frustrated with an early meeting with the professional standards department, we were at a chief's council meeting together, and I did say to him, can you just have a word, because it's not moving as quickly as I would like, and that was the length and breadth of our conversation, but I wouldn't have anticipated any more than that, because you've got to keep the chief constable separate in these matters, because sometimes they can adjudicate, so that would be standard for me. I wouldn't want to compromise him. It's a matter of record that the deputy chief constable, Fitzpatrick, doesn't agree with my interpretation. She stands by the interpretation of Police Scotland, and you're quite right to say that I think they've got a lawyer's advice. I think it's wrong. As part of your engagement, was there a point of contact that you were given, or did you have any support from officers from Police Scotland? I don't know a staff officer or something of that nature. We're pretty much self-contained. We do lots of these. We're not needy people, but our point of contact was the professional standards department and, principally, Mr Spears, I think. Ben, thank you, convener. Much of what I wanted to ask has already been covered, but going back to the point about the obstruction that you encountered with the legal team in particular, was that, in your experience, something that had continued from historical arrangements pre-emerger, or did it appear to be a set of processes or practices that had come about in recent times? I think that my understanding was, and Darren can cover this, my understanding was that the Federation, the supers, the professional standards, the lawyers and, indeed, the judicial reviews bear testament to this, have got into a position where they've made it overly legalistic, which isn't what the regs wanted. The regs wanted to get rid of that loyaliness, that overloyaliness, so that you could actually sit down and learn lessons. So the complaints are a liberating experience for an organisation because it shines a light on where you're letting people down. That isn't what's happened here. What's happened here over time is people have dug themselves into the trenches, and so you can't seem to get out of it. I think it's preposterous that, in an inquiry, I was invited to go and speak to officers and they couldn't be held to account for what they told me. They could have just told me a load of old bunkum and I'd have had to write it down and hand it on to somebody who was investigating. Then they'd look at me and say, well, you're not so good, Mick.  So I think it's grown over time, Mr McPherson, is my answer to you. But I do think it needs everybody putting to a sack and shaking up and saying, for heaven's sake, fix it and stop it because the only people who are suffering as a result of this are the complainants who are making complaints and they've got a less than optimal service and the officers themselves because it's dreadful that they're held under suspicion for quite so long. And I would add to that, members of the public, because I think members of the public deserve open transparency explanation and if their rights cease to exist from the point that the complaint inquiry is completed and don't stay with it right to the end, well, the result of that is that it's actually contrary to all of the strategic documents about explanation, apology, openness, transparency, understanding—that's never achieved. The only thing I would like to add is that Mr Livingstone was interviewed as part of our inquiry, but it's not significant and it was discounted in terms of the SPA report. I think it's right to explain that the work Northumbria police did was recommendation 39, so there were previous 38 recommendations, which I'm sure you are overseeing in terms of the counter-corruption unit, so that's the HMIC report. At a time when we're investigating processes within the counter-corruption, clearly other stakeholders had observed another 38 recommendations worth that perhaps improvement was required and what we didn't see within that was any policy book, rationale around decision making, which would have made our hypotheses and conclusions perhaps a little different if we understood why certain individuals embarked on certain actions, but there's nothing to defer to to try and understand Loog's decision making rationale as to why what we would call actions in an investigation, the investigation that brought about the legal revibrations, because there was no explanation as to why that was done or where it was to take the investigator, it makes it all the more concerning. I'm not clear if this committee's role includes sack-shaking, but we'll can look into that and maybe come back to you. It sounds a commendable practice for that. Margaret, you've had another question. I've highlighted and very clearly said that there are four people here who have been very much wronged and appears they're still being wronged. The committee is in receipt of a letter from one of those complainants and I think you said that the IP currently is deliberating on whether Police Scotland have delivered a recent decision to the IPT judgment. I think that these deliverance are still on-going and if you'll allow me to continue, this person says that despite this there's been an attempt to close down the whole episode as a result of a letter from Alan Spears, which says that I write to advise you, this is a complainant, that in line with the IPT recommendations it is the intention of Police Scotland to cleanse the contents of the relevant force databases and all material, not considered to reflect the truth of these matters, will now be removed. I would take it, you would be absolutely opposed to that as I think the committee have already said they are. No, that bit needs to be done, Ms Mitchell. In my evidence I gave to you, I said, if I'd been the chief when I got that in 2015 or the senior officer, it probably wouldn't have been the chief but anyway, the senior officer who received that very critical IOCRA report which said the activity you engaged in in April of this year was illegal and you shouldn't have done it against those four people, I would have got rid of that material there and then. That's the material that DCC Fitzpatrick wrote to me last week to oversee the destruction thereof and we will do that but we haven't put the arrangements in place for that yet so we're getting rid of, so the phone records that were illegally obtained still exist in, I mean, they're sealed off but they still exist in Police Scotland, they need to be destroyed. We're going to oversee the destruction of those records. I'm a bit puzzled, I'm not sure I understand that and the complainant certainly doesn't, because— But you've hit the nail on the head with that, with the fact that you're perplexed. Because people take an overly loyally approach to this, rather than sitting down with people and having a normal conversation in everyday language, people don't understand what's happened and that's exactly what's happened to these four complainants all the way through. They've either been starved of information or given very legalistic, dry, cold, and frankly, you can't understand the letters that you get. Until it is fully completed, if there's even a centillar of doubt that this might be relevant. I would only do that after I've contacted the four so I'm not going to steam in and destroy that without going to see the four people because we've got a good relationship with the four people so we're not going to do anything that's pivotal in this inquiry unless the four complainants are kept brief. But you see, I didn't tell you that because that's just like breathing. Those that are dismissed, which are really recent and could even have been this week, it's Durham's view—and I'm picking up the vibe from yourself—we won't oversee and it'll be our shout to provide that quality assurance to the four complainants. We will not oversee any destruction of data until we ensure that all proceedings ensuing from this debargel are concluded. Only at that point, and I'm sure that we would have consent—and there are two of the complainants in the room today—I'm sure that we would have their consent for Police Scotland to hold that information up until all matters are finalised. It would be wrong to do that because in that data it could be helpful information to those who perhaps may consider other proceedings. Thank you very much, that's greatly reassuring. Yes, it's very helpful to have that on the record. Stuart, do you have? The absolute clarity—I'm going to use a particular form of words—the data or information about which we're talking is information or data that it has been determined it is not legal for Police Scotland to have or perhaps—sorry, let me correct myself and say—the process by which Police Scotland obtained the data is not legal and therefore it's not legal for them to hold it, that is the data about which we are having this discussion at the moment. Both. It's both the data that led to the application—well, it's three—it's the data which led to the application, it's the application process itself and it's the data received as a result of the application process. Yes, but just to be absolutely clear, the process I'm not focusing on because all we can destroy when and if that happens is the data and information that's obtained. Destroy the false intelligence that was used to acquire the data itself, so all of it has got to be cleansed. Anything that's wrong in any of that process from the start before even any of the data was collected has got to be cleansed. I was just making sure that we have on the record a clear understanding of what data we're talking about. It seemed to me there was a danger as a layperson that we would get, but I think it's not clear if I'm asking you. Data was obtained but information intelligence was used to obtain that data. The information and intelligence will be cleansed as well as the data itself. Sorry, I will return to that subject. It would be perfectly legal for Police Scotland to have that intelligence that led to the action. It's wrong. Ah, no, no, I was going to make the point, but having it doesn't make it correct. Is that— Yeah, but they can't keep something about somebody when it's a lie. No, I understand that, but it was perfectly proper for them to have it in the first place for them to then conclude, as you say— No, because they made it up. Sorry? Because it was made up. So it was never legitimate to have it because they made it up. Right. Okay, that's clear. Thank you. We've gone over our times, very help. Can I, Mr Barton, just maybe ask—I know that you've looked at previous transcripts, and I wonder—you also talked about the pivotal role that senior officers could have played in that. Our early engagement on that issue was with DCC Richardson, and I wonder if you wished to comment on your examination of the transcript and whether he's been helpful to us discharging our obligations in relation to scrutinising that issue. My preference is that you read the report that I provided to the Scottish Police Authority. I'm very clear in that report. I am very clear. I'm grateful for that response. Okay, there have been no further questions. Can I thank you, Mr Barton and Mr Ellis, for your attention to detail on that issue, and for coming here today? I know that it's your shift journey home, and we're now moving to private session. Thank you very much.