Hi, good evening. Hi, Sanjeev. How are you doing? I am very well. Thank you. How are you? I'm good. Thanks for taking the time to join this Hangout. This is actually our second in the series of Hangouts that we're planning to do for the upcoming Agile India conference. It's a fantastic. Looks like somebody else beat me to it then. Yeah, we will try to get you to be the first person, but that's okay. I think a lot of people eagerly waiting to listen to you. So Sanjeev, quickly jumping in, right? I think you started the, you wrote a book on Agile management. That was called Agile, hang on. Managing Agile. That was back in 2005. Right. And it's been what, 11 years now since the book. It must be a great journey since in terms of helping organizations and I see that you've been very active helping a whole amazing series of companies and organizations. So that sounds very fantastic. How's been the journey so far? Well, we, as you said, we started a long time ago. Right. So in those days, it was only people who were doing Agile were considered crazy. So I just happened to be one of those. So early adopters and I remember there was a sort of a tribal feeling to it. The first Agile conference in 2002, Alistair Coburn, some of you might remember him. He pulled together a bunch of folks out in Salt Lake City and narration might have been soon about the time or maybe soon after that that I actually met you. So you and I, you and I go back a while as well.  And at about year number 15, which is last year, I stopped thinking about it and like, well, who knows, maybe we'll just continue. But certainly we've gone from, you know, the early days, extreme programming or XP on to scrum from there on to Kanban and now on to the scaling frameworks with like scaled Agile framework less, Nexus, etc. So it's turned out that all through that journey, one of the things that I've been heartened to notice that people have found that Agile is a way of getting being happier and getting work delivered, pleasing your customers, delighting your customers as well as having fun and leading your organizations in a new way. Now, we can't really say it's that new after 15 years, but it's been quite right. Absolutely. I think yeah, it's been a phenomenal journey and I keep asking myself how long this is going to go and it seems like this is becoming an unstoppable force, which is I think good in some sense and bad in some sense. And we'll get into that. But let's quickly jump to one of the questions that a lot of people have. And I think this is something that, you know, hopefully you will also address in your keynote at the conference. But what in your opinion are some of the key attributes of Agile leader? Like how would you define an Agile leader and what are the key attributes of this leader? Sure. So, you know, there are many definitions of leadership and maybe we should start there. You know, leadership is the most simple definition, the way I think about leadership. Leadership is about bringing about change, you know, managing, being a manager is about managing complexity.  And to me, being an effective Agile leader is not only about managing complexity, because that's part of the management part of the job. What about managing change? And if you're thinking about managing change, you're really looking at setting a vision of where one starts and where you want to go, where you want to lead your team, dealing with the uncertainty along the way, because nothing in life is certain. And the uncertainty on the uncertainty along the way is just part and parcel of leadership. So it's going to be up to us as Agile leaders to figure out, well, how do we go from where we are today to where we want to go, but also be prepared to deal with that uncertainty. And not everyone is comfortable with that. So that's certainly one of the qualities of being an Agile leader. The other really, I mean, you know, the critical aspect of being an Agile leader, I believe, which is different from leadership when we talk about it in maybe like a military sense or being a sort of a command and control leader, if you will, is about building the team. So any effective Agile leader has to know how to build a team. If you don't know how to hire the right people or if you have people on your team already, then you have to be able to take that group of people, mold them into a high performance team and build that team. And then the third aspect that I'd like to talk about is you have to be able to trust the team. Or actually, I would say you have to learn how to trust the team. You know, as a sort of a reformed manager myself, I have to learn how to trust my team because trusting our teams is not something that comes easily in a traditional organization. So as a recap, you know, dealing with change, dealing with uncertainty, building the team and learning how to trust the team. Cool. Awesome. I had basically to summarize like being a change agent, which again is setting the vision and kind of, you know, figuring out managing the complexity along the way, but more importantly kind of being the change agent, building a team that you can trust and the team can trust you kind of both ways because I think that again is very important. Winning people's trust is equally important as a leader. And I think that goes a long way. So beautifully put, I think that that's kind of a nice way of defining what an agile leader is. And these are kind of the core attributes that, you know, we should look out for. Sure. Cool. Let's jump into the next question. And this is again something I think currently if you see the state of agile, you know, I think last survey by version one showed that I mean, almost a vast majority of companies today are at a stage where they have, you know, at least one pilot project using agile methods inside their company. And they have seen positive results. They have seen positive results.   So what is your advice for people who are in this situation who want to go from one pilot project to this becoming the mindset of the culture within the company? Awesome. Yeah. And this is actually something that I'll be covering during my talk when I'm there, you know, week or so. And speaking of version one, this t-shirt is one of my version one favorites. This piece loves agile. So it's something that you can apply, you know, in your company. But anyway, back to our question over here about how to go from one pilot projects to a scaled implementation. There are different thoughts.  And if you as long as you have management support, do a big bang implementation. My personal belief and my personal sort of view is more pragmatic. You know, in terms of effecting the type of organizational change that we need, I believe you can only change or you can only drive organizational change at the rate of the organization that can absorb it. Or rather, you can drive the change at the rate that the organization can absorb. So if your organization can adopt a rapid amount of change in a short time, let's say six months, then that's the rate at which you should rate roll it out. If your organization was larger, more bureaucratic, less entrepreneurial, then it might take three years. Sometimes large organizations can take three to five years to go through a full-scale agile transformation. Whatever the time period is, the general approach is actually fairly straightforward. At least the ones that we've been applying in the last 15 years. And that's to say, let's start with a pilot project, test it out, maybe not just one, but maybe two or three types of pilot projects. Maybe one is a package implementation, one is a web project, one is some legacy system, just so that we can prove out our hypotheses in a very structured and disciplined way. And then what we want to do is run those pilot projects for a few months, maybe even up to six months or so, see how those prove out. And in the sense, we want to make sure that those projects are resourced, properly resourced in terms of a leader, scrum master, whatever you want to call the person, a product owner, somebody from the business side to prioritize it. They are full-time and are close to full-time, if you will, working on the project because you can't just kind of have the part-time allocation problem and still be called yourself agile. And once we've taken those projects and set them with a business goal saying, okay, here's the business goal. And our business goal can be very straightforward, simple things like cut time to market, improve customer satisfaction, or what's another one, reduce cost. Or you can say, well, our pilot projects could be doing a little bit of each one of these three things. And once we turn those pilot projects loose, we want to see how they prove out. At the end of six months, see how those have done and then take the learnings from that into another set. We call this an expanded pilot. And then the expanded pilot, we'll just go from three projects to 20 projects. Again, at the rate that the organization can adopt, run those for about another six months, maybe up to a year. And after that, do an enterprise adoption. So three-stage process, initial pilot, expanded pilot, and then enterprise adoption. They're very clear and defined in tree and exit criteria to each one of those things. But that's subject for a longer conversation. Cool. I think just to quickly summarize what you've talked about is, I think the key takeaway, at least for me, is that you can drive the change at the rate at which the organization can absorb it. That's right. That's right. You try and do it either too slow or too fast, then you might lose out people. And once you understand that, then your suggestion is take three-ish projects to three projects to have some variety, some variation in that. Run a pilot for three to six months. See, prove out the hypothesis that this actually works in the sense of whatever the leadership has set some goals, you try and validate the hypothesis that this approach of working might actually help. And then extend it to a few more teams, which you called as the extended pilot. And once you, again, revalidate the hypothesis, then you roll it out to the entire organization. And one thing I missed is two crucial points. One is, we have to make sure that we have top-down support and bottom-up momentum. You cannot have a successful adsorption without both of those things. Just the bottom-up momentum without top-down support won't be sustained. And just driving things bottom, top-down is not going to be accepted by the rank-and-file. So you need both top-down support from your management team and then also bottom-up momentum from the team members themselves. Sorry, I interrupted. Yeah, I think that's perfectly fine. I think that's a very important point because we see this as one of the common challenges at least in a lot of places where just one-sided, either a totally top-down or a completely bottom-up approach inevitably runs into some kind of a roadblock. And it's not a very happy environment to be an entertainment. So having the right balance where you have the commitment and the understanding at the leadership level and you have the buy-in at the ground is I think extremely important. And I think one of the most important things at least I have learned is at every level, people need to understand what's in it for them because at the end of the day, I believe we're all very selfish being and the first thing that comes to our mind is what's in it for me. And so I've seen a lot of rollouts where the entire pitch of what's in it for them is mostly all company company company and people are like, why do I care? So I think you're right, the bottom-up momentum and the buy-in is equally important as much as the top-down support in this case. Cool, that actually brings us to the next question which kind of just builds on top of it. So in your experience, what do you think are the top three challenges organization face when they try to scale agile in their organization? Okay, that's a great question. So in order to answer that question, I have to sort of look back a little bit down memory lane. So if you remember how we got to this, at least in software development, software development, software product development is based on what historically what we've called the water form, right? The software development life cycle is sometimes and that was prevalent since Winston Royce, I think proposed his original paper in 1974. And the version of waterfall that got embedded in many companies and actually worldwide was the one without feedback, going back and iterating on each previous step. And there's some interesting sort of historical anecdotal here. But along with that, what we found is, you know, you go from requirements analysis and design to development to test. But along with that, there's in software development, there's something called Conway's rule. And Conway's rule says, whatever process you have, your organization will become a mirror of the process. So along with the requirements along with, you know, with development and test, we have silos. So the waterfall process has created an organization structure over the last 40 or 50 years, where, you know, we have silos and people throw different pieces of work between those silos, which causes huge efficiencies. It's great for manufacturing. It's great for predefined work. But when you talk about adaptive development and adaptive product development, it's probably the worst thing that we can have. So what we do is when we create an agile teams that we break those silos down.  The entire organization needs to become adaptive and learn to break down those silos. So if you look at the three major problems that we face, one of those is that the silos that are perpetuated across the company throughout the organization. And so the eventual wearing down of the silos and massaging them to support the actual team and becoming an active organization that has to be driven by management. So one of the major challenges that management needs to understand that just, you know, sending people to scrum training or putting them on, you know, the DevOps platform, that's not enough. You have to drive the chart and change to the larger organization. Then once you do it, once you realize that, you have to say, well, what is the, you know, what is the approach to perpetuate that same agile adaptive way of operation across my whole company? And so then you say, well, I have to sort of reformat the surrounding functions. It could be HR, it could be resourcing, it could be production deployment. And so we say, okay, if I have my team, now if I'm able to make them more collaborative, let me go systematically through the organization and make my organization and lean organization. So that's a big hurdle. Breaking down the silos and then creating that value stream to cut across the, you know, the silos that used to exist and create a new value stream. And the third and final challenge is developing and sustaining that discipline to do that, right? Or continue to do that. You can say, well, we have a new way of organization, you can say, we have a new process, but even the best of us, you know, even after having done this for over 15 years, I have to catch myself, I have to catch for our company, we have to continuously remind ourselves that the only way you can sustain this is through sustained discipline. So a lot of people don't understand that agile, which is based on lean is a very, very disciplined process. And it has to become habit, it has to become ingrained and has to be sustained, right? So break down the silos, create the new value stream, and then develop and sustain the discipline. Absolutely, very well put. So those are kind of what you see is the top three challenges that organizers will face as they try to scale it. And interestingly, based upon the silos and instance paper and stuff like that, I remember looking at that paper and I'm like, holy cow, I just missed the point because Winston was trying to point out that you need feedback cycles and, you know, that stuff doesn't work, at least on large projects. And we seem to have this first two pages and decided that that's what works for us. The other thing that you talked about, which I think is very important is the, the structure, right? We had this joke going back at one of the companies I was working is that, you know, your software architecture is based on the building in which you work, that architecture of that. So if you're building as seven floors, then your software architecture will have seven layers. That's Conway's role in action. Yeah. And I think that kind of applies to how we structure ourselves, how we architect our teams in many sense. In fact, you know, I think Brad Anderson, the CEO of Best Buy put this very nicely, saying organizations have habit and they will stick to their habits even at the risk of their own survival. You know, that this is, this is something that we see quite a lot where, you know, organizations have certain structures, which we all understand are short lived because they put in place a certain purpose, but then nobody likes the organization and we keep kind of running with the same structure, even at the risk of distracting our employees or losing customer focus or our competitive edge. And this is, this is, I think, you know, a lot of times this is the problem we end up solving with agile in many sense, not so much of the actual techniques, but more of these organization structures and habits in some sense. I think those are kind of, again, going back to the three points you pointed out, the kind of top challenges that we see. Yeah, it's, we have to realize that even agile has to change. So the solutions of 15 years ago have to be brought forward and adapted towards today's environment. I just read a LinkedIn post today, they were talking about the head of Nokia, you know, and he had broke down in tears and he said, we did nothing wrong. Yeah, you did nothing wrong, but what you did was you failed to change, right, and that can happen to any one of us. We constantly have to deal with the change and agile is one of the best ways to adapt to that change. And what sometimes people don't have to, people have to realize that agile itself has to change. Otherwise, we're still applying things from 15 years ago. That's an interesting one, right. And you know me and I've been on the brand wagon of challenging people and pushing the boundaries. And I think there are two ways people take that when we make that statement that agile itself has to change. The first reaction, at least I get a lot is you don't quite understand what agile is. And you're like, yeah, sure. We don't. For example, recently, I was at a conference and I was talking about why I stopped doing test-driven development and people are like, you don't understand test-driven development. I'm like, sure, whatever aspect you want to, but I was giving back to the point is the two ways people take it. One is that you don't quite understand this doesn't need to change. So there's a lot of dogma. And I think that's what, in my opinion, kills any movement is just it gets too dogmatic. Other reaction that a lot of people get is you're right. And this is what agile was all about is it was about embracing change. And you know that embracing change and embracing uncertainty, which was kind of at the heart of at least when I've read the white book, the XP book, that's that was really what I got out of it as that we need to embrace change and embrace uncertainty that then resist it. And so agile also needs to do the same. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, there are certain timeless principles, right, that we can uncover with agile, but the techniques and the practices and the processes have to change. We can't really apply the same things that we did 15 years ago to today's market. However, what agile has been really good or people in the community have been really good is they've embraced new ideas like DevOps, startup DevOps, no estimation, a lot of new movements and kind of been good at embracing them. And so I think on the bright side, that's that's, you know, people would argue that agile has been constantly evolving. Absolutely, I agree. And that's why it's still there 15 years later. Yeah, awesome. So I know you've, you've done a lot of initial work and spent some time on the whole PMO aspect, right, the project management office, and you know, you have very strong insights in that. So my question to you is, is PMO still relevant in the agile context? And, you know, have we actually been successful, you know, changing the perspective of PMO from being process police to adaptive leadership kind of mindset? Okay, so that's a great question. Let me sort of rephrase the question and ask it back to myself. Well, I would ask that, you know, what is the role of middle management? You know, it's not just PMO because PMO project management organization or a program management organization is a crucial part of any organization. But there's a larger question is what is the role of middle management going forward as the organization as the larger company or enterprises moving towards agile and transforming and, you know, essentially changing.   And then you have to, we have to understand that that middle layer of management is where it impacts the most. That's where the silos tend to converge. Like there's a VP of testing or a VP of software development. That's where the organizational inertia is. And so it's probably hardest for middle management to make the transition from a traditional top down command and control organization to an adaptive organization. And to do that, the PMO can play a vital role. The PMO are some sort of middle management structure like a PMO is the best. Some people call a demand cycle or a portfolio management office or whatever, whatever you call it. Some sort of organization that is both leading the organization and creating process consistency and predictable delivery. So if you think about those two things, process consistency and predictable delivery, usually traditional PMO goes down the, you know, traditional PMO goes down the path of process consistency and then it becomes the dogma. Show me, check the box. Are you doing this practice? Are your stand-ups 15 minutes or longer? And if you did less than 15 minutes, we're going to fail you, that kind of stuff. You know, that kind of checkbox dogma comes in. But if you put a process consistency with a business goal in place and say, okay, we want to have some level of process consistency at that middle layer, even if agile teams, each individual agile team has a little flexibility, they can adapt, they can move things around. For the sake of, you know, if you take this lean view of process standardization, is it, well, we can reduce waste, we can eliminate some of the costs by having process consistency and that will also generate more value. So that's, that's one part of it. But the real larger goal that most traditional PMOs miss is predictable delivery. And if you think about predictable delivery, this is where PMOs can play a huge part, managing work and process, you know, looking at the portfolio of work, the demand that's coming in, helping regulate that, regulating that, working with business sponsors to make that more of an even flow rather than spike in demand that creates, you know, unpredictable delivery. If we have a goal of predictable delivery and we have PMOs that can say, well, I can help regulate demand. And I can work with business customers and prioritize my portfolio projects and then create an even stream that agile teams can take off and deliver it. Well, that's fantastic. We can get predictable delivery, right? Making sure that we're orient towards business value, taking say, well, I want to work towards my true business value, not just, you know, check the box and say, yes, I have a consistent process. But here's my, here are the goals that my business customers have. And now I can help my teams and sustain them, move them in that direction. And then creating just visibility, right? Not just in the team level. So we have, we can have our, our boards, you know, task boards and all that kind of stuff at the team level. But just like some of the scale metric methods to help us to do, if we can visualize all of the work in process at the program level or the portfolio level, then we can create no consistent flow across the entire portfolio. So these all areas where a PMO can be not only completely relevant, but also hugely valuable to the organization. Cool. I think that's very well put. Just to quickly summarize, I think what you, when you started with saying, well, let's kind of quickly rephrase this question to bring a little bit of broader perspective. And you talked about how, as we go through this change, the middle layer of the management is where we're going to see the maximum amount of organizational inertia. And even if you were to able to get them on board, what you really want them to focus on is the business value and predictably delivery, you know, instead of just focusing on a checklist based process consistency in the org. And then you also talked about other kinds of things that these guys can help in terms of building an adaptive leadership or an adaptive organization is through bringing in org wide visibility and other tools that, you know, we see useful as we go into this transition. Yeah, I'm simply answering the question that you asked, what's in it for them? You have to, there has to be an answer to that, the question there, you know, after our middle management are human beings, just like everybody else. So they're wondering, what's it for me as well? It's a, how can I best contribute value to my organization as my team's most essential? I think personally, this is one area where I think in my opinion, I could be wrong, that agile has done more damage than good is, you know, a lot of organizations have this, this layer of management that's kind of grown up over the years. And in many organizations, these are in some sense the backbone of the organization, even though it might not be very visible. And they might not be very effective. It might not be a great backbone, but in some sense, they are the backbone of the organization. And I've been in organizations where this time we want to do this agile transformation and we felt that this is the layer where we're going to have maximum resistance. So we decided to just let go all of these people. And I've been in one hour on the day when this whole thing was happening, it was, it was, it basically shattered the organization in my opinion, because people on the ground basically, you know, felt the complete insecurity. And when people feel insecure, I don't know how much, how open they would be to try out new things or to change stuff. So there's been some, in my opinion, some knee jerk reactions in few organizations to kind of bring management on board. And there's a lot of wrong, in my opinion, a lot of wrong suggestions, people, or a lot of wrong actions people do in the name of agile. Yeah, absolutely. Cool. Let's keep the momentum and jump on to the next question. What can large enterprises learn from startups and vice versa? What can, you know, startups learn from large enterprises? So, first one, large enterprises from startups. So that one's is simpler and certainly the, you know, you can go to any business section, you know, or a business section of any bookstore and you'll see maybe a hundred titles on innovation. And so in the one word, the best thing that large enterprises can learn from startups is how to innovate, right? In, in business school, they will sometimes use the term entrepreneurship. You know, how, how can we create entrepreneurs or an entrepreneurial organization that's internal to the organization? So it's really a question of how can we create innovation, sustained innovation within a larger organization so that we don't have, you know, the, we don't go eventually go out of business ourselves, right? The innovators, the so-called famous innovators dilemma, you know, you're making money on your, your cash cow product and you want to keep doing that.  And so one of the things that large organizations can learn from, probably the main thing that large organizations can learn from startups is to create a culture of innovation. Now we have to be careful with this because the same type of innovation, freewheeling, you know, work around the clock and ad hoc type of innovation that works in a startup is not exactly going to be the exactly the same way that you innovate within a larger company, just because it's a, it's a larger company. So how can we create the conditions that are similar where people are willing to take risks and are rewarded for taking risks, right? That's what, I think that's what a large company can learn. You know, why do entrepreneurs take risks? Well, they're in it for to make a name or to make money or to make a name and money. Now those, those are two things. But within a large company, how can we incent or incentivize people to take risks and do that in a structured discipline, fashion, run a bunch of experiments and create a portfolio of experiments that eventually, you know, if you're running it like a venture capitalist, well, some of them are going to pay back at some point and do, you know, to create that environment, risk-taking environment of innovation within a large company is what, what I can, I think a large company can learn from startups. Cool. That's, I think, so that's a very important point, sustained innovation, if I were to summarize, and that's, that's something. And two, of course, to achieve sustained innovation, that is the risk-taking ability, the environment, you know, where the risk and rewards get, you know, weighed in. I also think a lot of people look for purpose and sometimes in larger companies, the purpose is kind of lost. And that's something that I see in startups is there is that zeal, that, that sense of urgency as well as the sense of purpose of what we are trying to do. That's very evident and, you know, that those are kind of all elements that again add up to sustained innovation in, in many ways. Yeah, cool. In fact, just last week I spent time at a company doing an executive, you know, meeting with all the leaders in the organization and our, the week, the agenda for the week was how can we run this company as a 10 people startup garage. And so there's a lot of interesting ideas around as we scale, how do we keep the startup mojo in the company. Absolutely. That's what is going to keep us in business and relevant five, 10 years from now. Without the chaos of a startup. I have the opinion that chaos is good. It's like Indian traffic, right? Yeah, chaos is good. We can be opportunistic and novel ideas can come out of chaos is what I think a lot of energy is spent on structuring chaos. I think that's an oxymoron. But yeah, anyway, let's, let's move to the next question is what can startups learn from large enterprises? Yeah. So larger, you know, larger enterprises have eliminated chaos, but they also at some point they eliminate innovation and they get, you know, stuck ossified and rigid and they're not able to adapt and change. So somewhere among that spectrum, you know, from chaos to rigidity is a balance, right? And so to use your analogy of Indian traffic, you know, one of the, in my first book managing agile projects, I use the, you know, based on, of course, Jim Heisman's old metaphor of complex adaptive systems. In complex adaptive systems, you have this idea of the edge of chaos. So you're not in chaos, and you're not really completely towards rigidity, but you're in that productive edge where, you know, psychologists will call it flow, where if an, if an individually as individuals, if we can get into a, into the zone and get into do awesome work and get stuff done, we call that psychological flow, right? It's the place that we are most productive. Now, think of an organization, a startup that can create the conditions for flow and sustained flow. And you can't do that if you're in chaos, right?  So just like, you know, large companies need to learn about sustained innovation. I think smaller companies need to learn how to create that state that, that space where people can be in sustained flow. And to have that sustained flow, you need some stability, right? You need stability of work environments, stability of teams. And that's generally what a larger company can provide. So you start up and learn how that is done in large, larger companies that will benefit them. Cool. Awesome. The edge of chaos, not, not tipping over. Productive edge of chaos, I think is a nice way to put it.  Where we go from, you know, complete anarchy, chaos, no idea what we are doing to extreme rigidity or extreme dogma. And somewhere along the way is the speed spot for organizations. And I think as we scale, I mean, going back to our topic of the day, as we scale within the organization, I think the key is to, you know, find that sweet spot along that spectrum, because it's very easy to kind of go to the extremes, in my opinion. Finding that sweet spot in the middle where you have the productive edge of chaos with sustained innovation and sustained flow. And that's, in my opinion, that that's what I would be looking as an outcome from any scaling methods, right? That's, that's, that's what the outcome I want from something like that. Yeah, and it's very straightforward. It's very straightforward. I mean, the key to that is developing the right systems and the right processes. And I said right, which means also implies right sized, right and right fit. So if you have the right systems and the right processes to support our teams, then we can keep them in that, that zone of sustained sustained flow, if you will. And that's what takes you out of startup chaos into a more predictable environment. Yeah, and avoid all the thrashing and going back over the kinds of challenges. That actually takes us to the next question, which is, you know, I think back in the days, I remember 2005, you know, large medical project I was working on, people distributed different continents, different countries, 600 plus people building a product or a portfolio of product. And our way to scale things back then was scrum of scrum. And we had this analogy of being good tribesmen and being good citizens, right? So, you know, balancing the queue and that's kind of what we were trying to do. And scrum of scrum was the model. I think from those days, 2005, we've come a long way and we've been seen lean agile PMO, we've seen the Spotify model, we've seen the scaled agile framework, we've seen less, which is Lasky and scrum, disciplined agile delivery, professional, you know, scale professional, scrum, the Nexus framework, we've seen a lot of these scaling techniques and frameworks. But do you think we're kind of going overboard with these? Yeah, everybody's printing their own money, right? So, think of it. So, you mentioned that version one survey and, you know, you talked about people adopting agile, but in that same survey, it also talks about the prevalence of scaling methods. And you talked about 2005 with the scrum of scrums. Well, actually, I have it right here. Maybe I can, I think it was in my second book, right? The lean jumpstart. And I might be able to pick it up here if I can remember which page it's on. The scaling methods, let's see, maybe I should look for it in this. Yeah, here we go. 56%. Sorry, that's the scrum. Okay, I'm not able to find it over here. But anyway, the scrum of scrums is the leading scaling method, even today in 2016. So, most people when you, when we are talking, most organizations, that is when we say we're scaling, most people are saying, well, my scaling framework is the scrum of scrums. So, it's that essential evolutionary step that every methodology has to take to go from the team level to one step up, right? You talked about being good citizens, doing time, good tribesmen. If you're talking about organizing a group of teams, every methodology, every scaling methodology that is has to have embedded within it some sort of cross team, cross project, meeting some communication mechanism. So, if we abstract all of those things out, we're really just talking at the current state as in 2016 in terms of scaling. We're talking about three levels. We're talking about a team level or a project level. We're talking about program level and a portfolio level. So, think of it as tiers, right? We've got three tiers. And then we're saying, well, the scrum of scrums is the first step towards the middle tier. How can we coordinate across the, you know, going above the team level from the first to the second layer? How can we coordinate there? And then if you take that well from the program to the portfolio level, if you're talking about that, then there are some other techniques that we pull in. Now, every methodology, whether it's the scale natural framework or less or our own Jeff Sutherland's scrum at scale, they're all, or Dan, discipline, agile delivery or Nexus, they all are different instantiations of that three tier framework. I think scale is safe. Might be moving towards a four tier, but at least, you know, those are the three based tiers. Each one of the creators believes that what they have to offer is the best. And I think that's a good thing because if you think of the early days, you know, we had scrum, we had XP and Kanban and the market sort of chose and whittled down the choices. And I think we're at that stage now with the scaling methods. So, you know, if you think back to the agile manifesto, I think there must have been nine or 10 methodologies now you don't hear about. Now it's pretty much scrum XP and then Kanban was a later addition, if you will. And now, you know, you could have a, you know, word alphabet soup, if you will, but in less and dad and all these other methods. But I think eventually one or two of these will stick. And this is just a natural evolutionary, you know, selection of those that three tier model, if you will. So I'm comfortable with the chaos or being on the edge of it. I think that's very nicely put the three levels and then, you know, also looking at, you know, that this choice is good at this stage in time because this is going to help us find what the survival of the fittest in some sense of the survival would be most adaptive in some sense. And so we will have it, you know, in the near future, some kind of winner out of these models, or some might kind of get influenced by each other and get, you know, embrace good points from each other and kind of become the next generation of movement. There will be some consolidation, whether it's a few years or many years, I don't know. Sure, sure. So that's, that's a good way to do it. So this is, as you put, maybe this is, this is at the phase where we are just about at the edge of chaos and, you know, let's embrace it. Let's see what stands out. Cool. We have 14 minutes to go and I did open up questions. So if anyone in the audience has questions you want to ask, please feel free to use the Q&A button to ask questions and I'll shoot it to Sanjeev, you know, on your behalf. So till that point, let me kind of entertain you with some of my own questions again, you know, as we I thought you were going to sing a song or something. You have two high expectations, man. So tell us about the five core lean principles that you believe is, is the building blocks or the foundation for these various scaling frameworks and techniques. We talked about there are all these frameworks and then the three-player in some sense and some maybe going to the fourth year. But let's go to the foundation, right? What's, what's the building block for these various scaling techniques? What are some of core lean principles? And I think you've distilled it down to five core lean principles. So can you please explain briefly each of these? Absolutely, sure. So you've probably heard me mention these, you know, in our 45 minutes or so, limiting work and process, having too much stuff in flight at any point, whether it's the team level, the program level or the portfolio level is wasteful. And it's hugely wasteful. This is where we said the middle management can play the best, best value-adding role. So limiting work and product, what this simply means, if you have a bunch of checks, we've got too much work going on, we need to reduce or eliminate a lot of it, right? Just put it on hold, focus on a few things, get our teams delivering a few things at a time and that'll help us go immensely faster. So limiting work and processes is where we need to start. Once we have limited work in process, then our work can start flowing, right? Once the work starts flowing, then it becomes up to us, incumbent upon us to manage that flow. What are the best new control mechanisms? How can we make the work transparent? And how can we have that flow that we talked about flow of the work? To get both of these things done now at the bottom level, we have to make sure that we have stable teams. If you have too much flux, people leaving, people coming onto a team, high attrition rates, if we don't have a stable team, we don't have an engine of delivery, that's not good. So we have to make sure that we have stable teams that can be sustained over the long haul. Because if you have full flow work, well, you need to send the work somewhere. And if our stable team needs to be able to take and absorb their work. Once we have a few stable teams, we have to make sure that we can build a network of teams, combine them together into something much bigger. That's how we get scale. That's how we get orders of magnitude with the economies in scale. And that's where our scaling methods come in, because they start to coalesce or combine these teams, our individual teams, stable teams into a network of teams. And then the fifth principle is just keep improving. Just everything that we've said so far is about being prepared for change, adapting the methods, just getting better and agile, but getting better at scaling. So just being ready to improve continuously and not just saying, not reaching some state and saying, this is it, I'm the king of agile or whatever, or the queen of agile, we just have to be prepared to improve continuously. So limiting whip, work in process, managing the flow, building small stable teams, and then building a network of those teams and then improving consistently. Cool. There you have it. Those are the five core lean principles that according to Sanjeev are the building blocks of the foundation. And we need to focus on these as we start scaling our implementation. And this Hangout is for the people who will be coming to the Agile India conference, right? Yeah, but anyone else is open to join as well, the Hangout. And the video is going to be available online on YouTube. So we're hoping that many other people can benefit from this in terms of the insights that they gained from you. Yeah, I was just going to make a plug for the book, because that's all in this scaling agile and lean jumpstart book, which everyone in the conference will be receiving copies. Yeah, absolutely. So this is this is part of Sanjeev's book, and that the book is going to be given to all the attendees of the conference. And we believe that this is this is a very useful book. And it's a very nice and crisp book. I think it's some 60 pages, maybe a little less than that. And that's just a beautiful way to introduce people to some of these scaling techniques and the five core principles that you talked about. It's written for managers like me, who have a very short time, attention span. I always thought the other way around, but I'll keep it to myself. All right. All right. Let's quickly get to one other question, which is, you know, you're you're the chair, you're the current chair for the Agile Alliance agile executive forum, the AEF. Tell us a little bit about what is the objective of this forum and what's happening and how can other people benefit from this forum that you've been running? Well, sure. So the everybody should know the Agile Alliance. It's been around for a while, sort of August body that's been run, you know, helping propagate agile through the world. And one of the offshoots of the Agile Alliance, one of the programs, if you will, is is an event that is targeted towards, you know, top level managers. These are executives or folks who work for them. And it's it was kicked off, I think, by Jim Heismanth and Pat Reed a number of years ago, and it was called the Agile Executive Forum. In the last two years, last in 2015 and in 2016, I was asked to be the chair of the event. And one of the things that we've done is to build on that foundation that Jim and Pat had put in. In fact, Pat will be joining me this year back again as a co-chair. But our goal is to say, you know, is to really, you know, tightly hone in on that level at the executive level or level right below that and say, these are the leaders of tomorrow. How can they take organizations and help change that entire periphery of stuff that we talked about around the Agile teams? What tools and techniques are available for them? How can they learn from each other? How can they come to an event that's specifically designed to meet their needs? And that's what the Agile Executive Forum is. And there's also something that we model around that. And that's actually called the Agile Leadership Academy. And the Agile Leadership Academy is an initiative of mine that's related to the Agile Executive Forum. But we, you know, that's where we sort of got this idea that we can prepare the leaders of tomorrow to go off and take Agile. Now you can say, some people are saying, you know, here's so much about Agile in IT. Why can't we take Agile and apply it to business? Why can't we take Agile and apply to HR? And so we're starting to see this next generation of Agile beyond IT. And in order to make that successful, we also need executives, top level leadership who are educated about Agile and who understand that even though it came from IT, Agile can be applied across the entire company. Awesome. And I think you also touched upon the Agile Leadership Academy. And this is something that I'm really hoping that when you're here in India, we can get more opportunity to hear about and learn in terms of how we can have something similar in India. Because that's, as you pointed out, lots of, lots of questions and challenges around that space. And this seems to be, you know, a good initiative to kind of fill the void, you know, to prepare the next generation leaders in some sense, but also kind of take the existing ones and help them network with each other and kind of build on each other's expertise. Cool. I think we have last six minutes to go. And we do have a question that came in from the audience. So I want to, you know, at least make sure we get that question addressed. So this is a question where it's basically saying, in most of the scaling implementation, we have a multiple vendor team managed by different types of contracts. Any suggestions for managing multi-vendor implementation in Agile? Sure. Actually, the Agile PMO is a great one. You know, we talked about that when you have multiple teams and then some of those teams might be outside of your organization as an a vendor team. What you need is a program level group that can maintain, you know, traditional project management terms.  And it's essentially making sure that whatever dependencies that you have with one vendor or multiple vendors, how can we make all of those visible? How can we track and manage those and then look at the flow of work across the teams and including vendor teams? So one of the best ways is to look at the Agile PMO, the Agile program management office, and there's plenty of stuff, you know, online. If you just, you know, Google, Agile PMO, Sanjeev, Sanjeev, JIV, you're going to find a lot of material about how to manage multiple teams, including vendor teams around that.  I think one of the challenges building on the previous question, and I've seen this in many organizations here in India, is that, especially in a multi-vendor situation, what might happen is testing might be outsourced to one vendor and their independent testing group and ideation and architecture and things like that might be held in the house and then development can be outsourced to some other vendor, right? So now you have each one kind of trying to protect the turf, if you will. And then there is a lot of, you know, non-collaborative, non-working together, poking holes in others' work, kind of an attitude or a culture, and that's very counter agile, right? I mean, it's not productive agile in many sense. So any specific ideas or suggestions on how to deal with something of this nature or not even just go there? No, no, I actually want, because that's reality, right? So we have to go there whether we like it or not. That's where people live. The first thing we have to realize is that, you know, we spent so much time bringing people together onto an integrated team. And then we take that and we blow it up and say, well, my testing is going to this company and my development and deployment is going to this other company. Well, what we've done is not only have we reinstated Waterfall, but we've exacerbated Waterfall, right? We've taken it and in Waterfall at least we had silos within the company. Now, what we've done is we've amplified that problem and 10, 400, who knows, by creating those silos outside the company and then giving ourselves the job of managing it. So that's just totally counterproductive. What we should do and the questioner mentioned contracts, these things need to be based into put into the contracts, right? One of the things that I advise companies that I work with is if you're working with vendor companies, put in your RFPs, your request for proposals, mandate that they should do agile, mandate that they have to collaborate, mandate that they have to work together, because that has to be the value proposition. Once you do that, you can pre-select a bunch of companies to work with, make those your trusted partners and then give each one of the more quarters. That's the way we do it over here and that's the way that I've seen it done all over the world. It takes significant reworking of the contracts, contractual language, because most the legal, that sort of department, you have to bring them in and you have to redo your contracts. But once you get the RFP process in place, once you have an agile contract, then you create that standard that all vendors have to collaborate. Now, lead companies do this all the time, agile companies just have to learn how to do it as well. Cool. I think so. The agile contract is a very important point in making sure that we are aligned right from the RFP stage to make sure that we actually have this working partnership going on. Yeah, because the companies are thinking the same thing, right? What's in it for me? Why am I going to take my collaborative, my competition is going to eat my lunch? So we have to make it valuable for each company to collaborate with the other company. That's interesting because the next question that we have on here, so we have a question from Vishal and Vishal is asking that taking the point related to what's in it for me further, most of the teams are, most of the team members are actually asking, will I get better appraisals if I adopt everything that you're saying like whatever, you know, an agile. Not everyone does software for the love of it. So how do we deal with situations like this? I'll tell you what we do in our company. What we've done is we have team profit sharing. So the company does well, we give a net, you know, we do a percentage of profit back to the teams and it's very carefully that we've been involved over the years and we know we should have individual bonuses and you still have that sort of merit-based pay and all that. But we incent and align financial incentives towards team contribution. If I want my team, if I want to incent team-based behavior, then I have to align compensation with that as well. And it's a bit of an advanced question. So thank you Vishal for your question. But if we want an agile enterprise in the long term, then we have to make sure that our HR systems are aligned towards that. We have to make sure that our compensation is aligned towards that. And so yes, if you want collaborative behavior, then towards a certain extent, we have to reward that. And the best way to reward collaborative behavior is to reward the team. Awesome. I think we've kind of run out of time. So we will try and wrap this up here. But again, thank you Sanjeev for taking the time. I know it's late for you, but I greatly appreciate you spending the time and sharing some of your insights. And I'm really hoping that people will leverage you being in India. You're doing a workshop on the 14th of March. This is again back to the topic you were referring earlier is the Agile Leadership Academy on the scaling agile. So your workshop is going to go in and focus on that. And in fact, what we had discussed is kind of not start at the very basic level because the kind of people coming to the Agile India conference have already, you know, in our opinion, already gone through the foundation of the lean and agile leadership level. And now people are more interested in, you know, which is basically scaling agility. And that's kind of where I think your workshop is positioned. So I'm hoping that a lot of people will take advantage of this, you know, great opportunity.  I think you guys are doing this in future at 10x rate of this. So I'm hoping that, you know, take advantage of this opportunity. But, you know, this is great. I'm looking forward to your visit. And thanks again for the time you spent this evening. Thank you, narration. I'll see you in a couple of weeks. All right. You have a good night. Take care.


Another target you can aim for is the throw. So those are very important targets that will devastate any opponent regardless of their size.  So that's a really good reason why the beauty is so effective.


1. Jackson Carlaw How would the First Minister characterise her legal guarantee to treat people within 12 weeks being missed in a quarter of all cases? First Minister. As Jackson Carlaw is well aware, he certainly should be aware of it, this Government is investing record sums in the national health service. We also see record numbers of people working in the national health service, but the demand for our national health service is rising. Rising demand is ensuring pressure on waiting times. That is exactly why we have in place the waiting times improvement plan, which is backed by £850 million of dedicated resources, and the first resources of that have already been allocated by the health secretary. I regret the fact that there are people who are not being treated within the treatment time guarantee, but I would also remind Jackson Carlaw that, since that guarantee was introduced, over 1.7 million patients received their treatment within the required time frame. Patients who perhaps would not have been treated within the 12-week time frame had that guarantee not been in place. Jackson Carlaw Frankly, the First Minister, missing her legal guarantee in one in every four cases, is surely an unqualified failure. The First Minister talks about the efforts being made now, but let's look at her record in reducing waiting times. For example, last year, the previous health secretary launched a big new campaign to recruit much-needed radiologists into Scotland vital if we are to reduce waiting times. We now learned that this campaign resulted in the recruitment of just five staff. No wonder we saw a 38 per cent rise in the number of us waiting for over six weeks for diagnostic tests in just the last year. Why should we have any faith in this Government's promises now, when we know that previous much-height promises have flopped? The First Minister Well, in terms of radiology, as I hope Jackson Carlaw is aware, radiology is actually experiencing acute shortages worldwide, not just in Scotland. That is why we have increased training places in Scotland and why we are acting to improve recruitment. It is also worth noting that, since the Government took office, consultant radiologists have increased by 45.4 per cent. By 2022, we will have increased specialty training places in radiology by approximately 75 per cent from 2014 levels. The international radiology recruitment campaign launched in 2018 generated interest from clinicians around the globe, and health boards are now finalising a number of offers of appointment. I hope that Jackson Carlaw will have the good grace to welcome some of that. Before I finish this answer, I want to draw attention to the chamber and, indeed, to Jackson Carlaw in particular, to a letter that is in today's Times newspaper, signed by 24 medical professionals across Scotland. I just want to quote it to Jackson Carlaw, that, as doctors, nurses and healthcare professionals from Scotland, we see the damage Brexit is already inflicting on our treasured national health service. The loss of thousands of European staff has led to crippling staff shortages. I take my responsibilities seriously. When are the Tories going to take their responsibility for the damage that they are doing to our national health service? The acute shortage in radiologists was identified in 2014 by the First Minister's logic. It was clearly the uncertainty caused by Scottish independence that was responsible for that. Of course, it is not just the waits to get into hospital. It is the safety and cleanliness of the hospitals in which doctors and nurses have to work and in which patients are treated. As the health secretary rightly said earlier this week, public confidence has been shaken by the infection outbreaks that we have seen reported in recent weeks. How many safety and cleanliness inspections have taken place in Scotland's hospitals in each of the last five years? I do not have that precise information to hand, but I will ensure that it is provided to Jackson Carlaw. I do know that, over recent years, this trend started when I was health secretary. Before I say that, I am not in any way underplaying the experiences that have been seen at the Queen Elizabeth in recent times, but infection rates in our hospitals have reduced dramatically. For some infections, the reductions have been more than 80 per cent. That is down to the dedicated work that is done by cleaners and others in our hospitals. I hope that Jackson Carlaw would recognise that. We continue to take those responsibilities seriously. I go back to the point that I made earlier. Jackson Carlaw referred to it as my logic. The words that I quoted are not the health secretary's words. They are the words of health professionals across Scotland. I repeat them and ask Jackson Carlaw to respond to them. The loss of thousands of European staff has led to crippling staff shortages. The UK Government's Brexit deal would be terrible for Britain and for patients' health.  That is why we urge MPs to stop this harmful Brexit. Those are the words of health professionals. Will Jackson Carlaw respect them? If Jackson Carlaw is keen to establish an Opposition leader's question time each week for 45 minutes, I am very happy to answer questions to him. However, this is First Minister's question time. What we have all become used to is Nicola Sturgeon referring back to her ever-bigger book of excuses, which, like Pinocchius knows, has grown much bigger since the start of this year. The figures to the question that I asked were answered in a parliamentary question last night. From a high of 38 safety and cleanliness inspections in 2014-15 to just 19 in 2017-18, and only 14 over the last 11 months, less than half the number of just five years ago, whatever excuses are given by the First Minister, I think that most people will conclude that that is also a failure and that it is unacceptable. Can I suggest that, when this Government legislates to set a guarantee, it meets it? When people lack confidence in the cleanliness of hospitals, the record under the Scottish Government is not to cut the number of inspections by half. Does the First Minister not agree? First Minister. First of all, Jackson Carlaw's response is that he does not really fancy addressing the point. It is no comfort to health professionals worried about Brexit, the length and breadth of this country. I would suggest that Jackson Carlaw does a bit more delving into how the healthcare environment inspectorate does its work. It decides on the inspections that it carries out. It decides on the schedule of those inspections, as we discussed just a couple of weeks ago, are risk-based. That is a point that perhaps Jackson Carlaw does not know. In addition to cleanliness inspections, the HEI now does thematic inspections, which look at the broader patient experience and will often include cleanliness and infection rates in hospitals. Perhaps a little bit more research on Jackson Carlaw's part here would pay dividends. I come back to the point here. We have had some experiences that Jackson Carlaw and I have discussed in recent weeks about infection outbreaks at the Queen Elizabeth and Glasgow royal infirmary. Those are serious and they are taken seriously. However, the overall trend in infection rates is downward in Scotland's hospitals. When I was health secretary in the early days of my time as health secretary, CDIF, MRSA, big, big concerns in our hospitals, 80 plus percent reductions in those infections. For Jackson Carlaw not to recognise that, it does not do a disservice to me or to the health secretary. It does an enormous disservice to staff right across our national health service. 2. Richard Leonard The 45-day consultation to decide the future of the Caledonia railway works in Glasgow ends in just four days' time. Time is running out to save this critical part of Scotland's railway infrastructure and to save these 200 highly skilled jobs. Can the First Minister update the chamber on what steps her Government has taken to safeguard those jobs and to retain this site? The First Minister As Richard Leonard knows, the minister involved has taken a very close interest in this. Unions has spoken to the company, has encouraged the company to extend the consultation in order to allow other options to be properly investigated, including options that would involve Transport Scotland. We continue—the consultation has not yet closed—and we will continue to apply as much pressure as we possibly can on the company, because the jobs are important and I think the way the workforce is being treated is unacceptable. Richard Leonard It is a good decision and I am glad that we have reached this outcome, because it allows us to protect not just the asset but the jobs that directly and indirectly depend on it. That is what Nicola Sturgeon said after she took Prestwick Airport into public ownership in 2013. If it was good enough for an airport then, why is it not good enough for our railways now? The First Minister Richard Leonard should understand and appreciate, I hope, that before we can take a decision like the one that we took around Prestwick Airport, which I think was a good decision at the time, we have to undertake due diligence. We have to look at all the different aspects. That is why we have encouraged this company, Gemini Rail, to extend the consultation, because the current consultation period is too short to allow any serious exploration of alternative options. I hope that Richard Leonard will join me now, even at this late stage, in asking the company to extend that, because we are prepared to look at all options for this and we will continue to do that. As Richard Leonard has just demonstrated there, we have a good record and an interventionist record when it comes to saving industrial jobs across the country. Richard Leonard But First Minister, this consultation ends in just four days' time. I wrote to you almost four weeks ago, stressing the urgency of the situation. You have said nothing in response. The workers and their unions are awaiting a proper response as well. Out there in the real world, what is at stake are people's livelihoods and their national transport asset. Will you take decisive action? Will you step in? Will you bring the Caledonia railway works back into public ownership? First Minister In terms of saying nothing, Michael Matheson has led two parliamentary debates in this. There has been ministerial discussion and engagement on this. We will continue to look at and consider all options, but I say to Richard Leonard in all seriousness that the consultation timescale is not within my gift. It is not me that has set that, it is not the Government that has set that. We continue to call on the company to extend that timescale. It is worth noting that the works has an order book for ScotRail train refurbishment that runs until July, so there is absolutely no need to proceed so quickly and as quickly as the company is doing. Scottish Enterprise is working towards having a rail engineering hub at one or more locations across Scotland, where heavy maintenance or innovation can take place. Work on that is under way, and Scottish Enterprise has been carrying out discussions with the site owner on how those works could fit into that strategic hub idea. We will continue to look positively at all options. I ask Richard Leonard to join with me in calling on the company to extend the consultation. If he has one more question, perhaps he can take the opportunity now to do so, but, as we have done at Presswick, in a range of other cases, we will always act in the best interests of workers and jobs across the country. We have a few constituency supplementary questions. The first is from Claire Adamson. First Minister, I would like to raise a constituency case of a young woman with whom I met recently. In 2015, at the age of 17, and after the tragic death of her mother, my constituent took on the responsibility for caring for two of her younger siblings. North Lanarkshire Council's social work department would, in full knowledge of our circumstances, indeed visited my constituent's home to assess its sustainability prior to our siblings moving in. However, since 2015, and despite verbally seeking support on a number of occasions, my constituent has never been able to access additional financial support as a kinship carer. Does the First Minister agree with me that this case raises serious concerns that vulnerable families may be failing to access the support to which they are entitled? I thank Claire Adamson for raising the tragic case. It is indeed a sad and tragic situation for all three siblings. I know that everyone here will recognise the circumstances that Claire Adamson has shared with us. I know from speaking to kinship families that the impact that bereavement has on children and carers. It is really important that everyone involved is able to access the support that they are entitled to. We would expect a local authority to carefully assess the needs of a carer and children in a situation such as this, and to consider what support financial or otherwise is appropriate. The Scottish Government funds Citizens Advice Scotland to provide a specialised advice service, including information on financial and legal matters. We continue to work with social security colleagues, including those at Westminster, to ensure that kinship carers can access a range of benefits to alleviate the additional costs of caring. I would be happy to ask the minister to speak with Claire Adamson to see if there is any further assistance and help that the Scottish Government can offer in this particularly tragic case. Peter Chapman, to be filled by Claire Baker. To ask the First Minister what the Scottish Government's response is to the recent figures showing that more than 9,000 people were waiting beyond the 12-week target for in-patient or day-case admissions within NHS Grampian. Does the First Minister recognise that this figure has been rising every year, and it is now eight times higher than it was in 2013, that the NHS Grampian is a worst-funded health board in Scotland, with a short haul of £239 million over the past decade, based on your own official figures? Does the First Minister agree that the people of the north-east deserve much better? As I said in response to Jackson Carlaw, waiting times are not as good as we want them to be, or as good right now as patients deserve them to be. That is why we have the waiting times improvement plan in place, backed by the £850 million of dedicated resources that I have already spoken about today. The health secretary will continue to work with health boards to ensure that we see the improvements that need to be made. We know that there are record resources going into the health service and all health boards. We know that there are record numbers of people working in our health service, but the rising demand is creating that pressure, and we must respond to that pressure. Finally, as I have done frequently in this chamber, I simply remind the Tories again that, had we followed their advice in budget decisions this year and last year, we would be grappling with a situation right now where we had £550 million less to invest in our public services and our national health services in particular. I know that the Tories do not like that, but it is a fact, and it is one that I think it is about time that they started to face up to. Claire Baker, to be followed by Oliver Mundell. Thank you. This week, the awarding of contracts for the Murray East and the Concardant offshore wind projects were announced, and so far BiFab have received no work. It is over a year since the yards, which were on the brink of closure, were purchased by DF Barnes with support from the Scottish Government, and there has been no employment at the five yards or contracts since then. GMB and United are warning that the five yards could end up with nothing, as we see Scottish renewable projects being awarded to overseas companies, and the Scottish supply chain being squeezed out. Could the First Minister provide her response to the situation and give an update on expectations for the future of the yards in Fife? I thank Claire Baker for raising the issue, which is extremely important and one very close to my heart. Of course, it is important to note that BiFab have secured a contract to fabricate 150 pinpiles for the Murray East project. That contract will be at their Arnish yard and provide work for 90 people, which will start next month in March. Beyond that, we continue to work extremely hard. I note that the unions have been clear that they think that both DF Barnes and the Scottish Government are fighting hard to secure contracts. We will continue to do that. I share the frustrations of the unions and I share the frustrations that Claire Baker has just articulated. We will discuss with the unions some of the concerns that they have. I will quote Pat Rafferty and Gary Smith here when they talk about BiFab competing against established supply chains of preference. There are concerns that BiFab is not operating on a level playing field, and it is important that those concerns are addressed. In the short term, we will continue to work as hard as we can to secure work for BiFab. We have supported BiFab throughout, and, in the medium to longer term, we will work with the trade unions and others to try to address any underlying issues that are there that might be getting in the way of a successful operation such as BiFab winning those contracts. Does the First Minister agree that it is totally unacceptable for 1,000 patients to be transferred to a different GP practice in another town due to GP shortages? Following the closure of another GP practice, will the Scottish Government commit to reviewing GP provision in upper Anandale? In terms of the particular local issue, I will ask the health secretary to look into that and to respond to the member. Of course, health boards have a duty to ensure that there is GP provision for all the patients that they serve. As the member will be aware, the Scottish Government is taking a range of actions from increasing places at medical schools to increasing GP training places to incentive schemes to increase the GP workforce and will continue to invest in those initiatives to address some of the shortages that do occur. Question 3, Patrick Harvie. The Government this week published its transport figures and they make for grim reading. We are all aware of the urgency of our environmental crisis and the impatience that people are expressing from school strikes to climate scientists. Nobody has looked at the February heat wave without recognising that that is not normal. We need to change the way that we live and do it urgently. Transport is one of the areas where the Scottish Government has been repeatedly told that it needs to do better. Yet we are seeing more road traffic, more air traffic, less bike use and less public transport use. Transport emissions have gone up 5 per cent in the last five years when they should be going down. What is the Government getting wrong on transport and what is it going to change? First Minister. I agree with the broad thrust of Patrick Harvie's question so I want to come on to where I agree in a second but just a couple of points to note which I think give better context to this. There have been increases in traffic volumes and I will return to that but it is worth noting that greenhouse gas emissions from road transport are lower now than they were in 2007. In terms of aviation, while we are seeing also an increase in aviation, aviation currently accounts for less than 5 per cent of total Scottish emissions and of course we are one of the few countries anywhere in the world that include aviation emissions in the calculation of our overall climate change targets. Generally speaking, I agree that it is important to encourage people to look at different modes of transport. That is good not just for the climate but for public health as well. That is why we are investing more than £1 billion a year in public and sustainable transport to try to encourage people on to public transport and active travel. That includes £250 million a year to support our bus industry. We will continue to make those interventions and look for improvements where we can. The Transport Bill aims to give local transport authorities more flexibility around bus services. The final thing that I would say is that it should make all parties across the chamber think long and hard about the kind of knee-jerk opposition that we see every time that we do as much as contemplate anything that is designed to encourage people out of their cars. Those statistics should be a wake-up call to all of us. The First Minister says that the Government is encouraging public transport use but we are still seeing a shift away from public transport use and toward car use, so it is not working. The First Minister also says that we are counting our aviation emissions. Yes, we are counting them but we are not cutting them. Counting them is only any use if it helps us to cut them. The reality is that transport emissions as a whole have not been going down, they have been going up. There has been no reduction at all since the long-term 30-year trajectory around which we have been supposed to be cutting our emissions right across the economy, so we are still shifting away from public transport and active transport and toward car use when we should be going the other way. When will the Government address the fundamental lack of any attempt at traffic demand reduction in its transport and climate change plans? The First Minister said that we have doubled our funding for active travel. We have taken that from £40 million to £80 million a year. We did that in the previous year and we are maintaining that in this year. We are also supporting low-emission zones and, of course, working with the Greens, we are proposing extra powers for councils to do more around that if they so choose as well. We are taking a number of actions in which Patrick Harvie is right and we should continue to look for ways in which we can do more and go further. Patrick Harvie seemed to take issue with my use of the term encouraging people. People have choices around that. We cannot force people to use one form of transport over another. What we can do is invest in the alternatives that we are doing and to make it as attractive as possible for people to use methods of transport other than cars. We will continue to do that. I hope that we will continue to have the support of the Greens. I think that there is a challenge to other parties here whose knee-jerk opposition to initiatives sometimes get in the way of all of us trying to do the right thing. In June 2017, I asked the First Minister about treating waiting times in her hospitals. She told me that she was making targeted investment and was making sure improvements happened, but it got worse. In October 2018, I asked again—this time the First Minister told me that she had a funded plan—that it would substantially reduce waiting times. On Tuesday, was the First Minister surprised that waiting time performance fell yet again? No, I was not. If Willie Rennie had read the waiting times improvement plan, he would not have been surprised at that either. It is regrettable that we are where we are with waiting times, but we set out very frankly the challenge and trajectory that waiting times improvement would take. It is all set out there in black and white in the waiting times improvement plan. We are making targeted investment. I have referred twice now to the £850 million of investment to back that plan. Just last week, the health secretary announced almost £30 million, including, for example, extra money to Forth Valley hospital to deliver two new theatres by October this year, which will bring additional capacity for 1500 more joint replacements. By June this year, the hospital will have a second MRI scanner to allow 8,000 more diagnostic examinations to take place per year. The Golden Jubilee will purchase an additional CT scanner, which will be operational by next month, in March, which will provide an additional 10,500 images annually. Those are the targeted investments that will deliver the improvements in waiting times that the improvement plan set out very clearly. It has been eight years since the law was passed, and it has been eight years of excuses just like that. It seems the longer that people have to wait, the bigger the excuses from the First Minister. Nicola Sturgeon told us that her patient rights law was the way to cut waiting times, but it is just flim flam. Tricking patients does not get them treated any quicker. The law is broken 200 times every day. 13,000 were waiting. Now it is 18,000. What are the consequences for the First Minister if she breaks her own law next time, the time after that and the time after that? Will the First Minister pay any price for that, or is it only the patients who are going to suffer? We will continue to focus on doing the job that we are elected to do as a Government, which is to deliver the improvements that are set out in that plan. We will back that with record investment, record numbers of people working in our national health service. We know that demand is rising, so health services across the world are having to deal with that challenge. Scotland is actually doing it better than any other health service across the United Kingdom right now. However, in terms of the record of this Government overall, in terms of people waiting longer than 12 weeks for treatment, it is worth noting that, since the Government took office in 2007, the numbers waiting longer than 12 weeks is reduced by 21 per cent. That is not good enough. That has to go down further. It was 104,867 in 2006-07. It is 82,660 now. That is not good enough, but we will continue to target the investments to make sure that we see the improvements that patients have a right to expect. Some further supplementary is the first from Bob Doris, worldwide, Jenny Marra. Thank you, Presiding Officer. The Caledonian railway works previously referred to as in my constituency. Can I draw the First Minister's attention to a live tender? The company, Porterbrook, will determine on about which company gets the work to refurbish around 100 class 70, 170 carriages, which will be run on the ScotRail network. That could, if it goes to Springburn, secure around 40 jobs for around three years. I have written to Porterbrook commending the skills and dedication of that workforce at the Caledonian railway station. I very much hope that it will secure that work. Although I appreciate the First Minister, I cannot directly interfere in a tender process, does she agree with me that Gemini has got an absolute responsibility to bid for that work, to seek to bring to Springburn yard, to hope the 45-day notices and threats of redundancy and to offer hope to my constituents, not redundancies? Yes. I agree 100 per cent with Bob Dorris, and I commend him highly on the way that he has defended the jobs and interests of his constituents in this particular case. Gemini should remove the threat of redundancy, it should extend the consultation, it should certainly be prepared to bid for any work that is going and give all of his time to look at all options to secure those jobs for the future. Jenny Marra has been followed by Jenny Gilruth. The First Minister will be aware of NHS Tayside asking her Government for £12 million for repairs to an outdated electrical system at Ninewell hospital and a huge backlog of maintenance. It is not, I believe, in the public financial interest for boards to come back asking for more money and millions to be spent on piecemeal repairs to our hospitals. Glasgow has a new hospital, Edinburgh and new facilities in Aberdeen. If the business case adds up and is sustainable, will the First Minister commit to replacing the oldest acute hospital in Scotland and support a new hospital in Dundee? Business cases are looked at robustly and properly, as are all requests for funding by health boards for backlog maintenance, which is the situation in this case. The Scottish Government's capital investment group is tasked with doing that, and that is the process that is in accordance with capital projects of this scale. I would encourage the health board to continue to talk to the Government and to the capital investment group so that proper decisions can be taken in these matters in the proper way. Jenny Gilruth Last night at Westminster, all parties had the chance to rule out a no-deal Brexit, but instead the Tories chose to put 100,000 Scottish jobs at even greater risk. With just 29 days until Brexit, what is the First Minister's message to Theresa May? It is scandalous that we are now just 29 days from Brexit catastrophe being inflicted upon Scotland by the Tories. Last night, all parties, including Scotland's Tory MPs, had the opportunity to vote for Ian Blackford's amendment and removed the risk of no-deal, not just at the end of March, but removed the risk of no-deal forever. It is absolutely disgraceful that the Scottish Tory MPs refused to do that. I have to say that watching David Mundell, the so-called Secretary of State for Scotland, squirming in an interview last night, trying to explain why he did not vote for that amendment, was quite mind-boggling. The Tories are no longer standing up—they never were, but they certainly are not now standing up for Scotland's interests, and if that Brexit catastrophe hits, then every single one of them will bear the responsibility. Question 5, Christine Grahame. To ask the First Minister whether the Scottish Government is confident that it will end traditional black bag waste and a range of recyclable materials being buried in the ground by its target of 2021. Since 2012, there has been a statutory duty to recycle in Scotland, so recyclable materials should not be going to landfill nor to energy from waste. Scotland has already met relevant EU targets. However, our forthcoming ban on biodegradable municipal waste to landfill from January 2021 deliberately goes further and sets a marker for our environmental ambitions. As such, it is disappointing that there is uncertainty around the readiness of some councils to deliver that. We are aware of the significant challenges associated with delivering the ban and are working with public and private sector partners to tackle those challenges. Our focus now is on working with authorities who do not have a solution in place to identify ways that they can comply with the ban as soon as possible. Christine Grahame. I thank the First Minister for her answer on challenges. Can I advise the First Minister that having recently purchased a small musical toy torch with whirly coloured lights for granddaughter age one, it took me at least 20 minutes to remove it from its packaging with the aid of a Phillips screwdriver, I would add? Illustrating yet again that fighting packaging seems a losing battle, even the humble turnip is now pre-wrapped for goodness sake. What can the Scottish Government do to reduce idiotic and wasteful packaging, perhaps starting with toys and turnips, which would certainly help to reduce its targets by 2021? I should perhaps begin by saying that I am relieved to hear that the toy torch with whirly coloured lights was for Christine Grahame's granddaughter. On the serious issue, I agree that plastic packing is something that we all need to tackle. The Government is committed to substantially reducing unnecessary and difficult to recycle packaging to increase recycling rates. Earlier this month, we, along with other UK Administrations, commenced a consultation on reform of packaging producer responsibility across the UK, ensuring that business meets the full cost of managing packaging at the end of life. That consultation will run until 13 May. In the meantime, we will continue to explore how any new arrangements might best be given effect, including how they align with our plans to introduce a deposit return scheme for drinks containers in Scotland. I declare an interest with respect to my previous work in the environment sector. Presiding Officer, there is genuine cross-party concern that many environmental targets will not be met, in part due to a failure to take an evidence-based approach when setting targets and, indeed, subsequent weak implementation plans. For example, banning plastic straws without knowing their weight and volume, cutting food waste by a third without knowing how much food waste there was, and now, the 2021 waste to landfill ban. Will the First Minister accept that our environment targets and implementation require a robust, evidence-based approach? It is a bit rich for any Tory to stand up and talk about evidence, spaces and the importance of environmental action, given the knee-jerk opposition to workplace parking and discretionary powers for councils that we have seen in the last couple of weeks. On that, we will always act in an evidence-based way. In terms of the 2021 ban, I think that that is right, because it sets a level of ambition that we should all be working towards. Of course, 14 local authorities already have a long-term solution in place, and that includes our major authorities such as Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee, so our focus now will be working with those authorities who do not have a solution in place so that we can identify ways for them to meet that target as quickly as possible. To ask the First Minister what engagement the Scottish Government plans with the SQA to prevent possible strike action during the forthcoming summer exams. I urge the SQA and unions to continue constructive discussion to reach a resolution. The Deputy First Minister met the SQA's chief examiner just yesterday and sought assurances that the SQA is taking all appropriate measures to ensure that the exam diet is not disrupted and we will continue to monitor the situation closely. I thank the First Minister for that response. Parents and pupils across Scotland are already quite rightly very worried about the possibility of strike action with some teachers and now they have this additional worry that there could be strike action at SQA. What I think the chamber would agree would be quite the worst time in the school year. Six days ago in the Herald newspaper, a member of the SQA was quoted as saying that they have in place robust contingency plans. So could the First Minister tell parents and pupils exactly what the Scottish Government believes those contingency plans to be? There is an annually updated contingency plan in place to respond to any scenario that might pose a risk to the qualification system, and the Deputy First Minister will be happy to write to Liz Smith with more detail of that. Of course, we want to ensure that the contingency plan here is not required and that that should be our focus. It should be noted that the proposed ballot at the SQA is of a relatively small number of staff, around one in 10 of their roughly 1,000 staff. That said, industrial action would not be in the interests of young people. That is why I urge the SQA and the unions to continue the discussions to reach a resolution, and we will remain in touch with the SQA on that matter. On the wider issue of teachers, the offer that has been made to teachers in terms of pay is the best offer that has been made to any group of public sector workers, not just in Scotland but anywhere in the UK. It would see teachers' salaries in April of this year increase by a minimum of 9 per cent compared with current salaries. I hope that we can reach a resolution of that dispute in the near future as well, because it is not in anybody's interest to see industrial action in any part of our education system. Jackie Baillie The First Minister will be aware that pay talks between colleges Scotland and the EIS have broken up less than an hour ago, with no improved offer from the employers on the table. There is now the very real prospect of further strike action over the coming weeks, affecting colleges across Scotland, including West College Scotland, that covers my constituency. Will the First Minister agree that the pay claim that is made by college lecturers is entirely in keeping with the Government's public sector pay policy, and will she instruct the Cabinet Secretary for Education to perhaps take a less passive role to make sure that there is a reasonable settlement, reach soon something that he has done in the past? The First Minister Well, the Government does not take a passive role in any of these things, but we do respect negotiations. As somebody who, I am sure, would describe themselves as a trade unionist or a trade union supporter, I would hope that that is something that Jackie Baillie would also do, respect collective bargaining and on-going negotiations in any particular sector. In terms of college lecturers, I would certainly hope that we get people back around the table and that a resolution can be reached. This dispute, just to remind the chamber, is about a cost-of-living pay uplift over and above the harmonisation increase, which on average saw 9 per cent pay increases over three years for college lecturers. In the EIS Fela, view that as distinct from the cost-of-living uplift as distinct from the harmonisation deal, employers take a different view of that. Again, I encourage them to get back around the table and to reach a resolution that is in the interests of lecturers but also in the interests of students across the country. To ask the First Minister what the Scottish Government's position is on a ban on live animal exports. The Government is committed to the highest possible welfare standards for animals and to ensuring that livestock in Scotland are transported where that is necessary humanely and with respect and dignity. We recognise there are complexities and, certainly, we recognise the concerns around transportation. Our position is that, ideally, the process of quality meat production should take place close to where animals are born and reared. We are also working with the farming sector to explore ways of rearing more male dairy calves productively and profitably rather than exporting them. Colin Smyth I thank the First Minister for that answer, but does the First Minister agree that the scenes of weeks-old unwanted calves being transported hundreds of miles for hours on end from Scotland to Ramsgate to then be shipped abroad purely for slaughter, potentially in countries whose animal welfare conditions are inferior to our own? Does nothing enhance the reputation of Scotland and our vital agriculture industry? Is the First Minister really satisfied with the conditions that those calves are being transported in? Will the First Minister show leadership on that issue? Send a clear signal that the Scottish Government will bring an end to live animal exports for slaughter, and if the rest of the UK introduces such a ban, state now that Scotland will not seek an opt-out. The First Minister Firstly, there is currently no transport of livestock from Scotland to continental Europe for immediate slaughter. There is transport for rearing, which is where, as I said in my initial answer, we are exploring alternatives to that so that more male dairy calves can productively and profitably be reared here rather than being exported. It is also important to point out that there are very high standards of welfare in place, and we expect all legislation and rules on the transport of livestock to be adhered to. The Animal and Plant Health Agency approves export journey plans on behalf of Scottish ministers, and it investigates any non-compliance with those plans. We recognise the concerns that have been raised, and we are committed to working with the sector to explore alternatives to live exports. In terms of the possibility of a ban, the Scottish Government consented to the UK Government's call for evidence on proposals to ban export to slaughter, and we await the result of that review before deciding on what further action should be taken. We will move on shortly to members' business in the name of Alexander Stewart on world hearing day and hearing awareness week 2019, but before then we will have a short suspension to allow the gallery to clear to allow members and ministers to change seats.


Hi everyone, Joe for jaspyscasebreaks.com coming at you with 2019-2020 upper-deck allure hockey. Just a quick little pack break to give away the final 10 spots in that cup hockey break. That three box case. But first we're going to do the break. Big thanks to everybody here for getting in on it. Absolutely debilitating, we'll get to that break tonight. So buy in. There are the teams right there. Let's roll it. Let's randomize it. Two and a three. Five times for names and teams. One, two, three, four, and five. We always do the break first and then we do the randomizer, a different dice roll for the giveaway spots. Five times for the teams, one, two, three, four, and five. Ottawa down to Detroit after five. Where's the font that I've been using for August? Roberto Mono. Alright, so here's the first part of the list here and the second part of the list right here. And let's sort by column B. No trade window, I guess a very short trade window, but it's over now. Trade window closed. Typically no trade windows in these quick little filler breaks. Watched this game last night, it's on the other networks here. There we go. There's the pack that I ripped open. Here's the first part of the list. Here's the rest of the list. Final print out. Let's see what we got here. Oh, an autograph. Wow. It's unexpected out of a filler pack. Quinn Hughes. Vancouver Canucks, Sean Maddock. The Hughes brothers are pretty good. Five out of 50. Sorry, we have these rookie car top loaders. This is iced out autograph. Not bad. I was not expecting that. Alright, let's flip back over here. Let's gather everyone's names up again. New dice, new list. It'll be the top 10 after three. Good luck. One, two, and three. So from 11 on down, it's sad times because you're not in that cup hockey break. But thank you for giving this a shot. I appreciate it. Much happier times the top 10. You're in that cup hockey break. Steve Bennett, Steve Wright, Steve Burch, Jonathan Josh, Sean, Jonathan, Sean, and Sean. Congrats to the top 10. We'll see you for that cup hockey break a little bit later today, Jaspy's Case Breaks dot com.