I live in the United States of New York or I should say the greater New York metropolitan area. I'm in private practice. I consult. I do a lot of stuff with extreme programming, scrum, agile, and the like. In my spare time, I always like to find some new challenge to do. And my new challenge is learning to fly. So if you ever find yourself in the New York area, especially like on a Friday evening or Saturday coming in by air, you might want to consider taking the bus. Let's get started a little bit. This session, as you probably saw, will mostly be workshop. Everybody's got to contribute something here because listening to me speak is... Well, it's not that fun. Perfect. Okay. To start off with, I want to talk about the idea, the concept of portfolio management. How it comes into being. Now, everybody on here is probably familiar with these levels of planning in an agile world. Yes? Yes? Okay. Typically, when we start teaching people what agile is all about, we usually are more concentrated on things like the tactical end of things. What do we do for an iteration? What's that all about? Two weeks of work? Gosh, can we do anything at all? We talk a lot about scrum. We talk about stand-ups. Okay. How work gets accomplished. And usually, when I start off with teams and they get those concepts, they can do them fairly well. They get results. But the problem is that the organizations never really get the true benefits of agile until they start looking higher up in the food chain and all those strategic sorts of things, engaging people from the beginning so that they're not just doing the stuff right, but they're actually doing the right stuff. So we're going to be concentrating on roadmaps and releases. And we're going to apply that to a much broader situation where we talk about portfolios. Okay. Could somebody give me a definition of what a roadmap is? Raise your little pause. It's a plan of intention, yes. How's that different than a release when we plan our releases? Yes, that is true. Releases are typically going to be shorter. I'm going to make the point a lot more later that roadmaps are all about business value. Okay, there are a way that we can see ourselves going forward talking about how the business is going to operate and the things that the business needs from our development efforts. Releases, on the other hand, are kind of like on the cusp between our strategic thoughts and our tactical actions. Okay, so we're going to talk about the fact that release planning has to do with coordinating dependencies on understanding a little bit more because the foreseeability is better. Things are right up in our face. So start off with that. I also want to start off by making a really big point. Okay, and if you leave after five minutes, remember just this one point and it will make your day. Okay, the chart that you're seeing here is from Johanna Rothman's manager project portfolio book, which is actually excellent. Okay, and she has this systems thinking diagram pay particular attention to where we talk about projects. We're going to talk about the difference between projects and the way that we plan products. Okay, projects typically are much smaller. Projects are the things that we do things like release planning for. Okay, now the problem is that a lot of companies start off and they have like a budget the next year. Right, anybody in here working a company like that where they have governance and we've got so much to do. Right, and too many times what they do is they start off and start planning the way that they're going to be executing on all of their resources over the next year. They put together little cases and sometimes it's a business case, sometimes it's much more informal, and then they make commitments and they have certain dates and they carve up this stuff and they say, oh gosh if we can only plan properly, everything will come out right. So they start carving up stuff into these little teeny projects. I have a company, you've heard of this company, I don't want to state their name because there's a recorder going on here, that plans its stuff down to like four or six week duration projects where they're actually trying to get functionality done. This is usually a backlog of like one or two epic type stories. Okay, not a lot going on in them. What they fail to do is understand the issues involved in keeping this many projects alive.  If there's new business opportunities, if a project takes longer to do than we anticipated originally, if somebody gets sick and we don't have the resources that we thought we had, all of the work that they did in the beginning of the year falls apart. And what happens, what this diagram will show you, is that as these projects start falling apart, we start getting a lot more things going on, a lot more emergencies arise. And suddenly we have new projects which start superseding the old ones, which make the situation even worse. And the way that we combat that in an agile setting is to start thinking about products and product backlogs. So if you can remember that one simple thing, keeping the number of projects down will ease the amount of work that it takes to manage it. Just like with sorting, if I sort n number of items, it's going to take a certain amount of time, if I sort twice that number of items, it doesn't take twice the time, it's an n squared problem. So we've got to keep the number of projects down if possible. This is the counterpart to that diagram. Notice how this diagram gets kind of complex, because all the negative reinforcing feedback loops are out there. When things go well, we get all these positive feedback loops. We find things like people's time contention goes down, that we actually get more projects completed. We're able to focus better. All right. Oh, you know, one thing I never did, let me go back. Oh, this is working again. That's great. I never defined what portfolio is. I never defined that. It's partially because most of the definitions that we have are kind of poor. Typically when we talk about portfolio management in an enterprise type setting, what we're talking about are projects that are organized by a timeline of dates and the things that they're going to deliver. Our job is to make sure that we can always organize that well. Okay, so today what we're going to be talking about is how we can put together that portfolio to begin with, and we'll talk about the need to manage it in a kind of an agile fashion, where we actually go back periodically and review what we put together on our portfolio, and perhaps monthly have a portfolio management update session to take into account new realities, either from the business side or from the technical side. We're cut off a little bit over there. Okay, I have half a dozen terms, which may or may not be familiar to you. If they are, I apologize. I want to distinguish between what product lines and products are. Okay, now the examples we're going to use later come from a particular engagement that I had with a GPS manufacturer. They had a lot of product lines. They would have things where they developed stuff for automotive use. They had things that they developed for people that go out in the ocean, seafaring use, aviation use. They'd have consumer lines, they'd have professional lines, and they organized their company around those product lines. For work today that we're going to be doing, we're going to have only one product line in mind. So bear in mind this is a beginning course. It gets much more complicated as we go. Products, on the other hand, are things that are purchased by consumers. They're identifiable. They have names. Products will be sold. They will produce revenue for us. Products do not necessarily take development work. There are some products that are out there which are distinguishable in the marketplace. An example might be Microsoft Windows, where they actually have a home version, a professional version, whatever version. Windows Server 2008 is actually Windows 7. There's very little difference technically between them. Most of the difference that's between them is in the marketing. Products, the other important part about it is that products are sold based on perceived value. A long time ago I worked for a company you probably heard of called General Motors. Gosh, this is back in the days of the stage wagons. At the time they were trying to get away from having antennas that were on the fender of the car and they want to put them in the windshield. Well, it actually costs less for them to put the antennas in the windshield invisibly than to actually put the antenna on the car. Yet in the consumer's eye, this is a desirable feature. So they actually charge quite a bit for that option. So products have very little to do on the consumer side of things, the people that actually buy it I should say, with how much it costs to manufacture. And this will be a very important point when we go and start putting together our portfolios. Projects, you probably know what that means already. Those are the technical pieces of it. Roadmaps, I've kind of talked about. The term waypoint. Are people familiar with that term? Probably not. Waypoints come from navigation. They're actually a very old term. They're becoming much more popular with GPSes now. But it used to be that if you were sailing on the ocean, there might be a waypoint that said when I get to these streets, I got to make a left. A waypoint might be when you're driving, you'll know that when you go to Cincinnati, you should take I-80 now. So they're identifiable points. Our waypoints will be spots on our roadmap. So we're going to continue that metaphor. And release plans I think you know enough about. So the difference is between the roadmapping types of work that we do and the release planning sorts of work that we do. I said before roadmaps are value-based. They're how we can start planning for deriving profits, revenue, and then profits over time. Most of the waypoints they could get desired on a roadmap are put together by people like in marketing. And these people tend to have glasses that are very rose-colored. They start asking for impossible things in impossible timeframes. We're going to have to deal with that. When we do our roadmaps, we are not going to repeat the evils of going through a big design up front. We're not going to look at all of the development realities. And we're not going to talk about what effects matrixing will have, which I'll talk about in just a couple of minutes. So roadmaps are kind of idealized when we get started. Again, they're a much higher level plan than our releases. Release plans are where we start taking the technical realities into account, things like dependencies, things like resource availability, and unhappily matrixing sorts of issues. So I look at planning in general as a kind of a game, a game of constraints. These constraints will start off where we have to address a whole bunch of issues as we do our planning. We're going to talk about risk, and actually the tolerance that your company has for risk. If you're a young startup company, your risk tolerance is going to be really high.  You're passionate about it. If you are a large established company with shareholders and whatnot, usually you have very low risk tolerance. They do all these safe sorts of things, which is kind of not so fun. We have constraints on resources. Nobody puts together a company with unlimited resources. So the stuff that the marketing guys and the product managers put together, we have to face the reality at some point. There are uncertainties that are related to risks and the expectation kind of stuff. In my mind, these things form kind of a region. People familiar with linear programming per chance? Yes? A couple. It's a mathematical concept. We can put together a mathematical model so that, for example, if we were producing oil, we could look at the market demand for oil versus its price. We could put another bar that says, here's what it costs for extraction and lots of other kinds of things and carve out a region in space or I should say on a plane usually that tells us the best way for us to maximize our profits. Use a simplex method to usually run through those equations. That's great. It really is great. It has no applicability for this discussion because of the uncertainties that we're dealing with. They're so high that we can never get a reliable mathematical model to help us. I really wish I could. In order to do this properly, though, we're going to have to admit that we don't know enough. We're going to have to be agile. One of the basic things about agile is the idea of honesty and transparency. We're not going to try to fool one another into thinking things are the way that they're really not. Deep in my background, I actually have a degree in law. When I think about how you go about justifying a roadmap, I always think about it based on these two legal types of terms. You're going to learn something new over here, too. In the U.S., there's the idea of strict scrutiny by a court. When something really nasty is out there, like somebody can take away basic liberties, put somebody in jail, something like that, the courts, when they review those sorts of laws, have to be very exacting. They really want to make sure that we don't take away liberties from people unnecessarily. On the other hand, they apply a different test when they're talking about laws that maybe take, or about money. So if there's a law on taxation, the courts will apply this thing called a rational basis test. The rational basis test basically says if you can come up with any kind of argument that kind of says why this makes sense, we'll say that it passes muster. And we're going to be using our rational basis test when we go and put together our planning. We're not going to make people put together fictitious sets of numbers that prove down to five decimals of accuracy that these are the numbers that they really are. They're not. There's so much uncertainty in this stuff. There's so many swags that we put together that we're going to have to just live with that, find a rational basis to kind of explain our work, and then move on. We'll learn as we go. Typical sort of thing. The actual factors that we'll be using, using just in a couple of minutes, deal with the benefits that we're going to get from the feature sets that we put together, the costs that are going to be involved in however we go about planning our roadmaps and releases, and then the risks that are inherent. Now, risks are a funny thing, right? Because how do we deal with risks? So I'm going to talk about this on the next slide a little bit. But I want you to first think about a risk as something that's out there, right, that we need to deal with, and we're going to have to put some number against it. Now, I don't know how it works around here, but if you buy a house and you're not sure if the person selling you the house actually has the D to the house, many times they ask for some sort of insurance policy, right? And your risk of that person selling you the house not passing you good title is taken care of by the premium that you pay. Well, that's a way that you can quantify risk. So we're going to use that same kind of concept as we look through the various categories of risks. Now, it's kind of interesting. I'm going to talk about the concept of net present value. It's actually invented by somebody that you wouldn't expect to do that, but it was invented by Karl Marx, back in the latter part of the 19th century. He talked about fictitious capital. I guess he wasn't too kind about it. In any case, net present value is all about figuring out the time value of money, right? If I want $10,000 in five years, I don't have to put $2,000 a year away, right? Depending on what the rate of return is, I might be able to put together $8,000, let's say. So the time value of money allows us to look with present-day currencies, I was going to say dollars, but they could be rupees, with present-day currencies and to figure out which is a better idea. Especially if the sorts of things that we're talking about take an appreciable amount of time to develop. So net present value is a great idea. It's the discounting method that we want to use. For today, we're not going to use that. I don't think that everybody here is prepared with Excel sitting on their lap. I'm going to ask you just to remember that there's a concept that you can do with it, it's easily implemented in many different settings. That's pretty much the way they want to work with it. The problem with it is that we shouldn't rely on the perceived accuracy of our spreadsheets or whatever we're going to be using. The idea, though, is to go back and be able to compare one against the other, not to try to predict what the exact value is going to be. You've got to stay agile with this stuff because there's guesstimates involved, or as I'll say later, we don't call them estimates for nothing. Otherwise we would call them exactimates, and they're not. When we go through, and I should read some of these things, and we look at risks, we always are trying to figure out, gee, in a situation that could occur, what can I think of that might make our project fail? Now, you're actually looking at a scene that was recorded from a very dangerous airport in Honduras. You'll see in a second what actually happens. There's a big risk that somebody came up with, and they had to figure out a way around it. I'll tell you that the way that they dealt with the risk was to put in that stoplight. When we look at risks, there's basically six sorts of issues that will come up. We can talk about risks to the business. We can talk about the risk that a product that we put together changes our image in the marketplace, that a product that we put together changes the relationship that we have with our people perhaps. We have market risks. We say, will anybody buy our product? Will we get to market and be first to market with a product? All of these things will have an effect on how much we're eventually going to get. There's resourcing risks. Naturally, do we have enough talent on board or can we get it on board quick enough to actually do it in a timeframe that makes sense? Dependencies, either external or internal. We're going to have to figure all this stuff out. Of course, the technical sorts of things that go along the way. Make it worse. Many times, we work in organizations that organize themselves into functional silos. Anybody here work in such an organization where you have somebody and they're committed 50% to this project, 20% to this one, called Matrix. We have functional managers and we have project managers. Horrible. It makes the situation much worse, because we need to be able to focus and think about how to do stuff without trying to take other concepts like the amount of task switching that goes on as we try to spread people around thinly. Matrixing is an evil. You want to avoid it. Even though you're going to have to consider as you go through it. We'll talk at some point, I forget when this comes up, about how much harder it makes the problem. To do portfolio management is kind of easy. There's four basic steps. First, we've got to put together that roadmap. We're going to put together a roadmap initially based on things like net present value. What we want to do is figure out the projects that are out there that we really need to take care of, which are the ones that either give us the best value over time or that make sense to do to give us sustaining revenue as we go forward. Net present value will help you a lot in that kind of analysis. We then got to go and go down a level, just like with most kind of agile planning. We want to go from roadmaps, which might have an epic. This release of the product shall do wonderful things. Then we might want to take three or four or five epic stories out of that. We're going to split it up. We will do a little estimation along the way and come up with some release plans. These are very high level. We don't know enough at this point to even commit to doing a project, but we need something to get started with. We're going to do just enough to get us started. Now, you're going to apply the release plan against the roadmap. You're going to mix it. You're going to stir it. We're going to shuffle cards around. We keep on doing that until we can find that reasonable area that satisfies both the business side that it makes sense to do the product along with the technical side that says, yes, it looks like we can do this. But that's not the end of the game, of course. Then you have to start instituting a periodic review. Think of them as sort of like an iterative cycle on steroids, so that maybe every month, every six weeks, some period of time, we bring the management team back together to look at what's going on inside of our roadmap to see if conditions have changed. Perhaps we've gained enough knowledge now that we've put together the first couple of iterations to realize that this isn't really the product that we want to put together. It's a very agile concept to fail products early. Rather than spend all the money that it takes to develop it and then find out you have a loser, as soon as you figure it out, get rid of it, apply your monies to other work. At this point, let me see, how many people are in the room? I want you to self-organize into six different teams, and we're going to do it against the mirrors. Find some mirror area to work with. Everybody up? You've got to get up. I'm not going to assign them, but split yourselves up into six teams. If we can't move that stuff down there, then we'll have to make it four teams. Find yourself a good mirror to work from. You're going to need the space. There's going to be some materials to work with, but before you do that, before we start putting together our road maps, I want to introduce the products that our wizards up in marketing and the product line managers put together. Seems like I have a lot of sixes today, so another six products. First, let me introduce you to the company. Our company is called Location, Location, Location Software Solutions. And we produce GPS materials. We actually build the hardware. We've got some, how many teams? Four development teams that do hardware. We actually put together the embedded software on these hardware platforms. We have a full team that's involved doing that. We put together applications for mobile use. That's a pretty big part of what we want to do. We have three teams that have done that so far. We also have stuff that works on web applications. We have two sets of teams that do that. Here's the first product. The first product is a set of things that are augmented reality glasses. These are like goggles that you put on. What we want to do, if you want to, I could do a dramatic marketing of the vision. What we want to do is give people the option of buying these augmented glasses, which they'll wear while they're driving. The turn by turn notifications will come up in the goggles. But the great part about it is that they'll now have shopping opportunities. If we know something about our customers, their needs, wants and desires, and we notice that it's been at least 15 minutes since they've had Starbucks coffee, it'll tell them where to go to get the next Starbucks as they're driving. It'll show up on the thing. This is kind of like what it looks like if you went through it. Now, our wizards up in marketing also have some ideas about what the future for this might hold. You can take a look at it. It may or may not be interesting to you. They've put together some numbers, but you're probably going to want to look at to tell you what sort of market they perceive for this product in the future. And they also have some risks. I'm going to have you look through these. You're going to have to make pretend as you work through these problems that you know the answers to this stuff. Not everybody in the room is experienced in doing GPS's and building hardware and stuff. For example, it was actually kind of interesting talking to people that really did it because they really pounded me bad on what I told them to do. Anyhow, you're going to have to work through these sorts of things. Figure out what the potential problems might be along the way, like privacy concerns. In case we went back, we asked our development teams to give us some estimates, really high level estimates. In order to come up even with some high level estimates, the things to do and what I want you to do is split up that big vision. Make three, make four epics out of it. And then start estimating it. Okay? Put together something large. And in fact, for purposes now, we don't know how to convert things like story points into duration, because we don't have velocities to work with. So just put together your estimates in terms of the teams that you saw and some arbitrary quantity. So my estimates, and you can use different ones if you want, looked at the teams that were available and said, well, we don't have any mobile app kind of component to it. The hardware people, they got a long time to work on. They have four teams and it might take them, well, it's going to take them more than a quarter. You'll have to figure out for yourself if that's two teams working for two quarters or whatever. The embedded people, of course, have some work to do and the web app people have work to do because we need to get the data into this system. That's our first product. Second product, I'm sorry that these things are being cut off a little bit, is a product that gets installed on these high-end sports cars built by Subaru, which I guess isn't that popular around here. But I know them well. I drive one of these. The product that we're going to put together is called King of the Road and it sits on the built-in GPS, which is a hugely overpriced option on that car. I don't have one of those. What this will do is allow people who buy these cars to participate in road rally events. I don't know if we do that out here very much. Road rallies. People get some destinations to go to and basically it's not supposed to be this way, but it's who can get there fastest. And as you can imagine that's not usually popular with a lot of police departments who don't want people speeding. So it's also very hard to put these events together. So our wizards up in marketing said, hey, it would be great. We could have like a website that people could log into. They'll give them some rally instructions to go out. We'll let them run the course and then they can post the results. Sounds like a really good idea. Unfortunately, we have some issues. I want you to look through this market potential. One of the things about this is that the people who buy these overpriced GPS's already are very elastic in their prices. They'll pay anything. So we've got a good amount of flexibility in that regard. But if you look we only sell about 2,000 of them per year. So you might want to take that into account. We also have a whole bunch of risks. PND stands for portable navigation device. So it might be your cell phone. It might be a handheld device. We also have some risks of course that we may have lawsuits from the police about this. Be creative. There's going to be door prizes for the person who comes up with the most creative ideas. So we're going to be watching for those people. You will see that there's some estimates down there. These things by the way if we have six teams I have two sets for each team of these slides. So you can go back and get the quantification to look through this stuff. Third one. Wow, this is an interesting product called TrustMeNots which is for creepy guys everywhere who don't trust their significant others when they're out of sight. It doesn't apply to anybody in the room of course.  At a distance unlike the traditional chastity belt, our product gives the illusion of love and trust, blah blah blah. The market potential for this is like bad. We will get a lot of bad press if we ever make one of these. But on the other hand no press is bad press. It also means we have a tremendous amount of advertising that we paid nothing for. So you're probably going to take that into account. There are some real significant risks. If you notice over here we have a risk talking about we got to have it ready four months before Valentine's Day. Why somebody want to give this for Valentine's Day? I can't understand. That's going to be our big selling season. We probably have huge risks of privacy from people who use this and find out what it really is. And we have some estimates from our developers about this. Fourth product that we have is called Way to Go. This is becoming more of a commodity. But what happens is since we control the hardware we've built stuff into our GPS's that report back to a central office. So we know from all the GPS's that are out in the streets how traffic is flowing. And we combined that data with some historical data and we're able to give our people much better road guidance. It gets them on their way faster. There are risks associated with this too. We recognize that this is going to become a commodity going forward. Once a product becomes commodified the margins lower. It's much harder to make any money with it. You'll see though that there are some interesting sorts of potential. I want you to work through that. Fifth product is something called paint by cars. The idea about this without reading through it, you can read through it at your leisure is that you get into your car and you drive on the streets and the lines that you get from driving on the road become a picture that you now go back and paint. There's a web application built in with this sort of thing. It's for family based fun. We also have driving routes that we can suggest to you so that you can actually do it if you're inexperienced at it. You'll see that right now marketing says that we probably have zero money that we can make it this. However, we'll gain reputation like a cool company. That's going to be worth something to us. Final product is something called matte maker. This is a product that we're actually not selling directly to end-user consumers but we're selling it to the people that put together the maps that are used for the GPSs such as a company called Navtech. What we're going to look for are all the places that they don't have maps for. If you happen to be driving and we notice that there's no road out there, this will get sent back, we will be processing this and figuring out where the roads are before the satellites are able to map them. We can anticipate making some money with this. We have some issues about how to maybe do this even though we have some people that work through it. Now, for the next 30 minutes I need you to put together something called a waypoint summary. A waypoint summary, think of that as a mini business case. It's going to describe the cost. It's going to describe the benefits. It's going to quantify the risks. It's where you, if you were doing this for real, would put together your net present values and you'd be able to start to have a common place to compare. Yes, we're going to be working with estimates, not exactimates. For the meanwhile, we're not going to assume any kind of matrixing. Now, I used some assumptions and again, you'll see these on your sheets. You're perfectly welcome to go make up your own assumptions. Again, the more creative you are, the more likely you are to get the door prize. These are what my sheets look like. I do not expect you to come up with these sheets. What I want you to do is understand from these things that I was concerned about. You'll probably be concerned about a lot of other things. But you will see that I have some benefits that I can associate over time. Some costs for doing some development. I've identified some risks. Actually, the risk involved in putting those augmented reality goggles together, we may not have the talent on board to do that. I've quantified that by saying if I had to go out and have somebody else do it, what do I estimate it would cost? What's my guesstimate as to my ability as a company to produce this product in the time that I need? If I need to, I can go and have a business partner to produce the thing with me so I can quantify that. I can quantify things like privacy concerns. Where I'm going to be looking at what an average settlement might be for a lawsuit that says you've compromised my privacy. Notice that things like the privacy concerns probably don't have to be affected until we actually have product out in the market. I'm going to be looking at things like safety factors. If we start getting lawsuits, what's the difference? What would it cost us? Put some numbers together. When you're done with these numbers you're going to want to visualize them because otherwise you've got a bunch of numbers sitting on a sheet and probably for today you're not going to want to do spreadsheets you're going to want to do something more creative and you're going to self-organize and figure it out. These though are very useful to allow us to visualize how much we're going to have to spend now to make money later. We can get to that by working through some numbers. Other charts that are out here they're all in your packet. Take a look at them. Each of them will have some little tidbits in them. Do not copy my examples. Also, don't go further in the packet than you're supposed to. I've got to show you the slides before they become real. Here's that great product that's out there. Look at the risks on this. You'll have to figure out if it makes sense or not. This is actually one of the important takeaways. We don't necessarily know when we look at a product what to expect from it. We may have a certain desire to make a particular thing because technically we know how to do it or technically it's something we'd like to learn how to do but it doesn't mean that we're going to make money doing it. I put together some numbers out here for you to look through. When you are done you're going to go back and look at your numbers. These were the numbers that I put together. For each of the products that were out there I forecast a business value based on the net present value of the various streams that you saw for benefits and expenses. Notice how some of them were negative. If I went back and ordered them by their net present values, by the business value over time it would show us things like those augmented reality glasses. Not only do they seem kind of cool but they're probably going to make us a ton of money. Other products such as the trust me knots and king of the road, what do we do with losers? Kick it off. We don't need it. We make money by not doing it anymore. Just stop. When we're done we can then create our initial roadmap. This is not the take away from this session. We're going to do better roadmaps later. Now's the time. We've got about 30 minutes to go out and do this work. I'm going to roam around. If you have questions ask me. I will be your marketing, product owners, whatever. On your teams you probably need to if I was going to do this self-organize and have some people that are going to represent the hardware end of things. They'll be able to understand and make better estimates than the people doing web applications. You're probably going to want to have a product owner on your team. You can ask them questions. The people that stand up to be product owners, be brave. Give your best shot at this kind of stuff. Let's get started. There's going to be a benefit that accrues when we sell the unit. I believe that we're charging them extra per day to use it. There's some revenues that go over time. There's going to be on the initial one with the augmented reality glasses. That's going to vary over time. You've got to think through.  What I want you to do is to think about all those different vectors and risks. There's actually when you look at my notes, I can give you 16 different categories. Inside of those big six categories of risks. Not every risk occurs for every product. But as you look through it, you might want to use that list to jog your memory. Think about the fact that oh, we actually have a market risk out here. How are we going to deal with that? How can we reduce our risk that nobody wants our product? Business benefits. The things that show up on road maps are not things like oh, I like this better because it takes me less time to enter it. It's what I can sell that for. Because what you're talking about a benefit might be my code is easier to read and reuse. Now that's a really great technical benefit. The next part of this exercise is how to go and match up the road maps, however incomplete they are right now are release planning. Now the basic problem is that we have resources in time and we need to know are we going to over commit our resources as we develop perhaps several products in parallel with one another. Now there is a product out there. I hate to mention its name. It's Microsoft Office and Project. Microsoft Project does this sort of stuff. There's nothing wrong with planning using Microsoft Project if you keep it light like one get bar for each product and then assign resources against it.  This is not the way we do things in an agile world. So remember we're going to use a rational basis. We're not in a court of law here. We're going to expect things to change. That's why we do these periodic portfolio update management sessions. This is a road map. I want you to kind of look at this as a model for the sorts of things that you might want to be thinking about. The way that I go about putting together these road maps is with the use of 3M products which is what you are going to do right after I get done jabbing. I like to use 3M products and look at a duration as some sort of a length. And then I want to stack stuff up on the 3M cards so I can show the various sorts of teams that are involved. So if I need three times the number of teams for doing my embedded software than my hardware I might have a different color which is three times higher. The wonderful thing about doing that is that you can then put your cards up on this playing field and move them around to find what your road maps are going to be. Road maps also will have lots of things along the time frame. So if you can read this sort of stuff as we started moving these things around you are going to see events on there like I can't read that exactly but we are going to have to make a product announcement to the press at a certain point. We are going to be expected to show off our stuff at a particular trade show. We are going to have an advertisement in Family Fun magazine. These are going to become very important when we figure out, those are the waypoints those are going to be very important when we figure out how to match our release plans to try to make those events come true. So I now want you to get back in with your teams, do some of that stuff. The result of doing that should be that you can come up with a better road map. If you go back and compare and contrast and looked at this what is not really earned business value it is projected earned business value. If I go back and compare this chart just get a general idea of the sweep of it and the first year and compare that to this chart which shows that I have negative revenue for my first year. You can see that it is not just net present value that makes the difference. That is a starting point. It is actually considering all of the variables. Get with your teams, pick up some of these products over here. I do not want to take these home. I would like to do a little retrospective on what has occurred today. Now, you guys you are the guys with the mobile iPhone app for doing paint by vehicle. Paint by bicycle. What did you learn out of this? Anything today? Did you learn maybe not? That is actually very good. What these guys were concentrating on was looking at local markets to understand better not just understand but understand better what the product implications are. You are going to be doing that even with product owners that are going to be local. They are going to have those rose colored glasses so as you do a little bit more analysis into something maybe you do a product focus group. You learn more about what the product means. You will be able to use those results to guide you putting together your roadmap over time. Not everything is the way that it appears at first. Many times we use our preconceived notions of what is kind of cool or what we think would be great in the marketplace and then do a couple of number calculations and figure out that was a really dumb idea. If I could restate what you just said. What you were learning out of this was how our costs get spread over time. It is not just one lump number and when you get back home you will be able to perform NPVs against this because the further they spread out over time the harder it is to understand. Not every risk occurs when you start development. Some risks occur after it is released. I want to thank everybody for putting up with me for all this time. We have lots of topics to discuss. This is just the beginning. This should be just enough to get you started. I have a lot of work ahead of you to do this correctly. Thank you very much for your time.


Today, we're going to figure out how to tell how much time has elapsed between two dates. If you enjoy my tutorials and would like to see more, please think about contributing to my Patreon account at patreon.com forward slash metalx1000. So let's say you have two dates and you want to find out how many days has passed between the two of them. Well, let's first off look at the date command and what can be done with it. So a lot can be done with it, more than we're going to look at today, but if you just type date in your shell and hit enter, it's going to tell you today's date and time. Right now, while I'm recording this, it's Saturday, August 23rd. It's 1400 hours, three past that, 26 seconds past that, and it is 2014. So it's 2.03pm, to put it simply. Okay, so another thing you can do to get that output of a time, you can get displayed in different formats, and one of those formats is going to be important for today. We're going to say it's plus percent s, and when we hit that, you can see it gives us this big old number. What this is, it's the number of seconds that has passed since midnight on January 1st, 1970. So if I run this again, you can see it's been a few seconds, and if I run it every second or so, it adds one second to it. It's been about four seconds since I ran it last. Yep, there we go. Perfect. So now we know that we can convert today's date into seconds like that. Can we convert other dates that have passed, or ones in the future? Well, sure we can. I'm going to use control L to clear that, and I'm going to use the date command, and I'm going to say plus percent s, just like we did before. My video finished converting, okay. And what we're going to do now is say dash d, and we're going to give it a date, and we're going to give it in this format. We're going to say the year, so we'll say 2014. The month we'll say 01 for January, and I'll say January 5th. Okay, so if I hit enter now, you can see we get the number of seconds since midnight, January 1st, 1970, to that date. If I was to go and put in another date, let's say January 6th, so we'll say 2014. We say January and 06, before the sixth day. You can see that it is a slightly higher number. So what we're going to do here is how many seconds are in a day? Now, there's two ways we can figure this out. We can say echo, and we can say, well, there's 60 seconds in a minute. We're going to multiply that by 60 minutes in an hour, and we're going to multiply that by 24 hours a day. We're going to pipe that into our BCR calculator here, and we get 86,400. So we can assume right here that there's 86,400 seconds in a day. That's every day. Of course, another way we could figure this out is we can say echo, and we can say inside parentheses here that number, and we can say minus in parentheses the first date and pipe that into BC. And if I did this correctly, oh, I'm sorry, should be dollar signs here. I don't know why I missed that. So what we're saying is run this command, and since we're putting in parentheses with a dollar sign, it's going to put the output of that command. So basically, it's going to put this number, and do the same for this date. And there we go. We can see that, yeah, the dates are adding up properly when we're using the date command, because according to this, from one date to the next, 86,400 seconds has passed, and when we did our math earlier, it matched as well. So we can do the same thing for different dates. So here, we did from the fifth to the sixth, obviously, using the higher number first. Well, how many days passed from the second to the sixth? Well, we get, again, in seconds. So how do we figure this out in days? Well, if we know that there's 86,400 seconds a day, we can take this number and divide it by that. And that did not work, because it's dividing first. Right. We have to put another parentheses here, and parentheses here, and might have to put that in quotations. There we go. Four days have passed with a few little mistakes there. So why did we have to put up these things? OK, anytime you use the echo command, you should put things in quotations. I don't know why I wasn't earlier, but I should have been. But if you do basic math, please excuse my dear Aunt Sally, that you're going to do stuff in parentheses first. If not, division comes before subtraction, which means it was doing the division and then subtracting that number from the other. That's why we got this number before, and that's not right. So what we're doing here, and let me clear the screen just to simplify it so there's not other stuff on the screen, we're saying, OK, get the number of seconds for this date and get the number of seconds for this date and subtract them from each other. We're doing that first because they're inside parentheses. And then after that, that's going to give us the number of days in seconds between the two. So to get the number of days rather than the number of seconds, because we're smart and we know that 86,400 seconds are in a day, we can divide by that number. And from the second to the sixth of January on 2014, there are four days. And you can put in whatever you want here. Let's say we wanted to figure out from 2001, and we'll say February 2, 2001 to January 16th. Sorry, January 6, 2016. Well, we get a lot of days there. And again, if it's that large, then you can do more math after that to figure out the number of years and days. But we're going to stick with days for right now, because I don't want this tutorial to go on too long. I'm basically showing you the basic concept of how to do this, and now it's up to you to figure out the right math equations for the rest.  So anyway, from February 2, 2001 to January 6, 2016, 5,451 days will have passed. So I hope you found this tutorial useful. You can count down till Christmas or whatever you want to count down to. You can do a second counter, a minute counter, a day counter, a year counter. Well, if you count down to Christmas, that wouldn't make sense. But just by changing what you're dividing by, and I hope that you found this tutorial useful. And as always, I hope that you have a great day. Please visit my website, filmsbychrist.com. That's Chris at the K. There should be a link in the description. And again, have a great day. This is bad. You're bad. No, I'm not going to ask you to see. Obviously, I'm just bad. More than I even brought in your seat. My point, though, is I would like to take a moment to thank the following patrons who made this video possible by supporting me over at patreon.com forward slash middlex1000. The server's only giving you this much on downloading a file. You could do four connections and speed up your download. Another option would be as sometimes servers have mirrored servers. So even though you have that original server, you may have another server here.


I don't want to waste time, so I'm moving straight on to the next item of business, a statement by Nicholas Sturgeon on the conclusion of judicial review. The First Minister will take questions at the end of her statement, so there should be no interventions or interruptions. I call on Nicholas Sturgeon, First Minister, please. Thank you, Presiding Officer. On the 16 and 24 of January 2018, the Scottish Government received two formal complaints of alleged misconduct by Alex Salmond during his time as First Minister. Those complaints came from two separate individuals. The complaints were investigated under the procedure for handling of complaints involving current or former ministers, which I will refer to from here on as the procedure. As members are aware, that procedure was signed off by me and came into force in December 2017. As part of that procedure, I formally delegated responsibility for investigating complaints of this nature to the permanent secretary. The new procedure formed part of a wider review of Scottish Government policies and processes for addressing inappropriate conduct that the permanent secretary was asked by the cabinet to undertake in the wake of the me too allegations. That review was confirmed to Parliament by John Swinney on 31 October 2017. In August 2018, following the conclusion of the investigation into the complaints that were raised about his conduct, Alex Salmond sought a judicial review of the procedure and the way in which it had been applied to him. This morning, the court of session accepted a joint minute from the Scottish Government and Alex Salmond settling the action for judicial review. The permanent secretary issued a statement earlier today detailing the reason for the decision to settle this case. I think that it is also appropriate for these matters to be set out, at least in summary, to Parliament. Therefore, as far as I am able, in light of the terms of the settlement and perhaps more importantly the on-going police investigation, I will seek to provide Parliament in this statement and in the questions to follow with as much detail as I can. The decision to settle the case was taken by the permanent secretary with my support when it became clear that, in one procedural respect only, albeit an important one, the application of the procedure could be perceived to have been flawed. In November 2018, Mr Salmond adjusted his petition for judicial review to advance the ground of challenge based on interaction between the complainants and the person who was subsequently appointed as investigating officer before the complaints were formalised. In late December 2018, the work being undertaken to produce relevant documents to the court in advance of the full hearing that was scheduled for next week led the Government to reassess its position in relation to that ground of challenge in light of the full picture that was then available. After reassessing all the materials available, the permanent secretary concluded that an impression of partiality could have been created based on one specific point, contact between the person appointed as investigating officer and the two complainants in advance of and around the time of their complaints being formalised in January 2018. This prior contact was in the form of welfare support and guidance, which was provided to the women making complaints. It is important to stress, Presiding Officer, that the support and guidance was, in itself, entirely legitimate and indeed entirely appropriate. As was set out in the court of session this morning, the Government does not accept claims that this was in any way encouraging the complaints, nor is there any suggestion that the investigating officer did in fact act in a partial way or that either the investigation or the decisions that were reached were in fact partial. The Scottish Government is also confident that, in all other respects, the procedure that was followed was fair to all concerned. However, as members will be aware, it is a well-established principle that a process such as this must not just be impartial in fact, it must also be seen to be so. It is on that basis that the permanent secretary decided to settle the case and to agree that the decisions that she reached about the complaints at the conclusion of the investigation should, on that ground, alone be set aside. It is important to note, as a simple matter of fact, that today's settlement has no implications one way or the other for the substance of the complaints or for the credibility of the complainants. The judicial review was never about the substance of the complaints, it was about the process of investigating those complaints. It will be open to the Scottish Government to reinvestigate those complaints, subject, of course, to the views of the complainants. However, for reasons that I am sure the chamber will understand, this will be considered only when the on-going police investigation has concluded. It remains my view that the Government was right to begin an investigation when serious complaints were made and not allow them to be swept under the carpet because of the identity of the person complained about. While in this one respect, the operational application of the procedure was flawed, the Scottish Government considers the procedure itself to be robust and it remains in place. However, the permanent secretary has rightly instructed a review of the procedure's application in relation to the specific point that has arisen in order to ensure that employees can have confidence in the process that will be applied should there be a need in future to investigate complaints about ministers or former ministers. There is one final point about the process that I wish to make in light of today's developments. The Government has not at any time made public either the outcome of the investigation or the substance of the complaints and that will remain the case. As I have already briefly mentioned and members will appreciate, there is an on-going police investigation that must be allowed to take its proper course. The Government could also, as I have just observed, reinvestigate those complaints in due course. In those circumstances, it would not be appropriate for me or anyone else, for that matter, to say anything at this stage about the substance of the complaints. Questions have also been raised in the past about meetings that I had with Alex Salmond during the investigation, so I want to address that issue now. I met him on three occasions on 2 April last year at my home in Glasgow, on 7 June in Aberdeen, ahead of the SNP conference, and at my home on 14 July. I also spoke with him on the telephone on 23 April and 18 July. I have not spoken to Alex Salmond since 18 July. On 2 April, he informed me about the complaints against him, which, in line with the procedure that the permanent secretary had not done, and he set out his various concerns about the process. In the other contacts, he reiterated his concerns about the process and told me about proposals that he was making to the Scottish Government for mediation and arbitration. However, I was always clear that I had no role in the process and I did not seek to intervene in it at any stage, nor indeed did I feel under any pressure to do so. In conclusion, it is deeply regrettable—perhaps that is an understatement—that, as a result of a failure in the proper application of one aspect of the procedure that the Scottish Government has had to settle this matter today. The permanent secretary has already, this morning, apologised to all involved in echoing that. I want to express my regret in particular for the difficult position that the complainants have been placed in. I know that the permanent secretary has spoken directly to both women. I can only imagine how difficult the decision to raise concerns as well as the publicity around this investigation and the judicial review must have been for them in recent months. They had every right to expect the process to be robust and beyond reproach in every aspect of it and to reach a lasting conclusion. I am sorry that, on this occasion, that has not been the case. It is fair to say that, in recent months, all organisations have grappled with the challenge of ensuring fair and robust processes for the investigation of complaints, which can sometimes be historic in nature. It is because I personally take that task so seriously that the Scottish Government is determined to learn and apply lessons from this case so that any member of staff who is raising complaints in future can have confidence that every aspect of the process applied will be robust. Ensuring that a robust complaints process is part of the responsibility of every organisation to provide a safe and respectful working environment. I, as First Minister, am determined that the Scottish Government will live up to that responsibility. The First Minister will now take questions on the issues that are raised in her statement. I intend to allow up to 20 minutes for questions after which she must move to decision time to help the members who wish to ask questions. We are pressing their question-and-speak buttons now, and I will call first Jackson Carlaw, Mr Carlaw, please. I know that this is the subject of an on-going police investigation in which none of us must prejudice. Given the detail in the First Minister's statement, which we received just after 10 past 4, we will wish to reflect further. The First Minister rightly just mentioned the two complainants at the centre of the matter. Obviously, the trouble is that good intentions towards complainants are worth little if the Government cannot meet basic standards of competence. Let's be clear that what we have witnessed today is deeply disappointing, a questionable investigation, and seemingly an SNP civil war played out at the taxpayer's expense to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds in legal costs. Let me turn to some questions. Firstly, in November last year, the First Minister said this, I am absolutely satisfied that I, the SNP and the Scottish Government have acted entirely appropriately at all stages. Now we learn that this wasn't the case. Why only two months ago was the First Minister confidently insisting that she had got everything right? Did she just not know what was going on within her own office? Secondly, and I think of crucial interest today, Paragraph 12 of the Scottish Government procedure provides for the First Minister being involved at the conclusion of the process only when the outcome of the investigation is complete. In the light of that, why was the First Minister involved in a series of meetings and phone calls with Mr Salmond, about which, with respect to the latter, we are only being told today for the first time? That seems completely inappropriate in terms of the guidance within the procedure that the First Minister herself said that she had signed off just months before. Finally, let me ask this, we have learned a lot in recent months about the need to support victims of sexual harassment. In the wake of today's events, does the First Minister think it more or less likely that complainants will have the confidence to come forward? If this is the example of the Scottish Government, what hope is there of reassuring others? Does she not agree that, above all else, having the confidence to come forward when issues like this arise must be something that people have total confidence in doing? First Minister I thank Jackson Callough for his questions. I hope that he will understand not to respond to the more blatant political elements to that. I do not think that it is appropriate. Some of his comments about civil war are simply ludicrous and I do not think that if I was to respond on that basis, I would do justice to the seriousness of the matter at hand. Let me turn to the serious questions. First, Jackson Callough asked about complainants. I think that it is absolutely essential that we keep the interests of complainants at the heart of this. The Scottish Government took steps, as did many other organisations, to put in place a procedure for dealing with complaints of harassment, including complaints of sexual harassment. That procedure, in my view, is robust and remains in place. In one aspect of the application of that procedure, the Scottish Government processes have fallen short and I deeply regret that. That is something that the Scottish Government has to reflect seriously on and that is something that the Scottish Government has got to be determined to learn lessons about. Jackson Callough quoted something that I said I would not quote it back because I do not have the exact terms, but to the effect that I was satisfied with the actions that the SNP, I and the Scottish Government had taken. This is an investigation that has nothing to do with the SNP, so I will refer to myself and the Scottish Government. At that point, I believed that that was the case. Today, with the exception of the one aspect that the Government has conceded, it was flawed. I still believe that all of the aspects of the application of the procedure by the Government was fair and robust. That is no comfort to anybody because that one flaw has led to the decision today. Jackson Callough asked me, did I simply not know what was going on in my Government? Here we get to the nub of it. I did not know what was going on in the investigation because the procedure said I should not know what was going on in the investigation. I was informed by the investigation by Alex Salmond, but I did nothing to intervene in that process as a result of any of that. That is, I think, an important point and one that I am very clear on. Lastly, on whether that makes it more or less likely for complainants to come forward, I am absolutely clear that my responsibility and the Government's responsibility is to make sure that we encourage, enable and empower people with complaints to come forward by putting in place robust procedures and by doing everything that we can to make sure that those processes are beyond reproach. If mistakes are made, as a mistake was made in this case, in good faith but nevertheless a mistake was made, it is absolutely incumbent that lessons are learned in order that we can ensure collectively that we encourage anybody with a complaint to come forward and feel that that complaint is treated seriously and appropriately. Richard Leonard Can I thank the First Minister for her advance sight of her statement? The First Minister cannot be held responsible for the actions of her predecessor, but she is in the end responsible for the actions of this Government. And this Government has let these women down badly. Let's be clear, it takes unflinching courage to step forward and challenge powerful men and powerful institutions, which is why they deserve so much better than this. It's also why it's paramount that their treatment, their access to support and representation and their access to justice must be a priority. This is a question of competence, but it is also a question of trust. If this Government cannot be trusted to deal competently with a case involving a former First Minister of this country, what trust and confidence can other women have in this Government's handling of their complaints of harassment? This is extremely serious, so apart from a review of procedures, what further action is the First Minister now prepared to take to restore trust, to restore confidence in her Government's handling of present and future harassment complaints? I thank Richard Leonard for his questions. I am responsible for the Scottish Government's why I am standing here accountable to Parliament in the right and proper way, not with standing in this case because of the procedure. I was not personally involved in the conduct of the investigation, but nevertheless I absolutely set my responsibility to answer those questions. Now, given the error that has led to the situation that we are in today, I will make sure that appropriate steps are taken to learn and apply any lessons that are required. I have already said that I will say again that I deeply regret the position that two women have been placed in. That is incumbent on not just me but the Government in its entirety to make sure that we give confidence to women in future, that if they come forward with complaints, not just women, if anybody comes forward with complaints, those complaints are treated seriously and the processes applied are robust. Part of that responsibility is to be clear, not to try to make excuses but to be clear in fact of certain things and not allow those to be lost. The Government has put in place a procedure that is robust in all-bar one aspect, which of course is important because it has led to the situation that we are in today, but in every other aspect the Government is confident that that procedure was applied correctly. In terms of the error that was made, the review that has been instructed today by the permanent secretary, I think that it is important to allow that to happen and not to pre-empt any conclusions of that. However, I will happily give an undertaking today to report back to Parliament on the outcome of that review and any steps that have been taken as a result of that. Finally, I think that I said in my statement that the permanent secretary has spoken to the two women involved to apologise to offer support. It will be open in the future for the Scottish Government, dependent on the views of the complainants to reinvestigate those complaints. However, that consideration has to await the conclusion of the police investigation. I understand that the permanent secretary has spoken to or is speaking to in the course of today's trade unions in order to give assurances about how those complaints will be taken forward. I do not want anybody in this chamber to be in any doubt about how seriously I treat that situation. I think that it is incredibly important that people have confidence in processes. It is because of that that I feel so regretful at what has happened here today and feel the responsibility not just for what has happened but to take whatever action is required to ensure that situations such as this cannot happen again in the future. I will undertake to keep Parliament fully updated as that review takes place. We'll leave any. What must be protected in the midst of all this heat is the rights of people to speak up. Big progress was made with the Me Too movement. It gave people who had been silent for so long the confidence that they would be heard. It is important that nothing today stops that and this Parliament should stand together, should speak with one voice on that important issue. This is not a victory for anyone. I understand that the civil service procedure was flawed, but does the First Minister agree that the police must be allowed to get on with their work free from political pressure? I agree entirely with the sentiments and the substance of it. I do not want to sound pedantic. There is one point that I feel is important to stress, partly in the interests of what Willie Rennie is saying. The Scottish Government's procedure is not flawed. The application of that procedure, in one respect, weakened seeds was flawed. I know that that perhaps sounds as if I am nitpicking there, but it is an important distinction. Willie Rennie is absolutely right that a lot of progress has been made since the Me Too allegations came to light. I am not talking about that case, but it feels as if, every step forward, we sometimes take a step back in all of that. It is really important that we all encourage and make people feel that they are able to come forward. That is why I regret deeply what has unfolded today. Willie Rennie is right to say that this is not a victory for anybody. This has no implications one way or the other for the substance of the complaints. It is important for all of us to recognise that there is a police investigation under way, and it is incumbent on all of us to ensure that we do not say anything that may impinge on that investigation. That investigation, in the interests of everybody concerned here, is allowed to properly take its course. Thank you. I have nine member's mission to ask questions for obvious reasons. I let them these first questions and answers go on for longer. I do not think that I will reach them all, but if I have short questions, we should get through most of them. Ruth Maguire, follow up on any wells, please. We live in a society where women and girls regularly experience harassment and sexism, whether on the street and social settings or, indeed, in their workplace. What would the First Minister say to those women and girls to give them confidence that society can change? What should we all do, men and women, to stand up to those who perpetrate such harassment? Ruth Maguire raises the most important issue at the heart of this general debate. First of all, all of us and I think that all of us in this chamber do make absolutely clear that harassment against women and girls is completely unacceptable and should not be tolerated. Secondly, we must make sure that the correct procedures are in place for dealing with that and, pertinent to this case—this is where the Scottish Government has not got it right—that every aspect of the application of those procedures is robust and correct. The last thing that I would say, and it is a responsibility that I feel very acutely today, when mistakes are made, there is a recognition of that, a transparency around that and a determination to make sure that we recognise that in order that the process of putting right and learning the lessons of those mistakes helps us, rather than sets this back, actually helps us to encourage women to come forward in the future. That is what I am determined to seek to do. Annie Wells, followed by Stuart McMillan. I know that the permanent secretary has spoken to those two women at the centre of this today, but can I ask the First Minister what support the Scottish Government will offer those women in the future? The Scottish Government will, and as I said, as Annie Wells has recognised, the permanent secretary has already spoken to them. The Scottish Government will offer any support that it requires. I should say one of the, I do not know if that is the right word, it is the word that I will use, one of the ironies of this is that it was the giving of support to the women that has led to this situation. The support that was given to the women before their complaints were formalised was entirely legitimate and appropriate. The problem was that the person or one of the people, because not the only person, one of the people involved in the process of giving that support, subsequently became the investigating officer. That created the impression of partiality, although there is nothing to suggest actual partiality. The women will be offered whatever support they need. In due course, as I have said a number of times now, the re-investigation of these complaints is an option, but that consideration requires to await the end of the police investigation. Thank you, Stuart McMillan, followed by Rhoda Grant. Thank you, Presiding Officer. Can the First Minister be clear that the outcome of the decision today by the Court of Session is not an issue of guilt or innocence, but a matter of the process of handling a complaint not being properly carried out? Can she confirm that immediate and urgent steps have been taken to ensure that lessons have been learned and that staff can be confident of the procedures in place? As I said in my statement, not just this judicial review, but the lawyers amongst us in particular will know that judicial reviews are not about the substance of issues that are about the processes applied in a particular case. That is the situation here. This judicial review even had it not ended the way it ended today and had gone to the full hearing that was scheduled for next week, it would never have been about the substance. To use Stuart McMillan's language, that is not about guilt or innocence. What has happened today is regrettable. It is regrettable from the perspective of Alex Salmond, as well as the complaints. Everybody involved had a right to expect that this process, in all respects, was robust. However, there are other processes under way, as has already been acknowledged, and it is very important that those processes are allowed to take their course. Lastly, in terms of lessons learned, I have already mentioned the review that the permanent secretary has instructed. As I said to Richard Leonard, I am not going to pre-empt the direction that might go in, but I will ensure that that is thorough, and I will ensure that that happens as quickly as possible and that Parliament is kept fully updated. There have been long-standing concerns about the Scottish Government's transparency. We now know that the First Minister has spoken to Alex Salmond on five separate occasions, none of which are referenced in her diaries. Can I ask if she will now make the content of the meetings public, and if not, why not? The context that I had with Alex Salmond, and I have set out the dates of these today, were not Government meetings. I have known Alex Salmond as a friend and colleague for 30 years. He is not at this present time, but he was then a member of my party. People can make judgments on the decisions that I took. One of the things that I found out in the course of that is that there is no manual for suddenly finding yourself dealing with a situation in which somebody that you have worked with in that way is subject to those accusations. However, I was very, very feminine. I have set out the first meeting that it was him informing me of the complaints after that. He was making me aware of the concerns that he had about the process and that he was proposing mediation and arbitration at no point. That is the key principle for me. I had no role in the process. I did not intervene or seek to intervene. Self-evidently, I did not, because what he was seeking did not happen. That is the important principle and one that I am absolutely satisfied around. I am anxious to be as transparent as possible within the confines of an on-going investigation. Of course, as we move down and out of investigations, if there is more information that the Government can make available to Parliament, then, of course, we will do so. First Minister has just taken a question about support for the complainants, and I agree with offering support. Is it possible that the support could be provided from a third party if the women prefer? Yes, I am sure that that is possible. I will certainly feed that back and any support that... Not just those women, but anybody within the Scottish Government who has concerns or issues about any former minister or other member of staff in the Scottish Government should be offered appropriate support. If that is from outside the Scottish Government, I think that that is something that should be considered. Last question, Donald Cameron. Paragraph 12 of the procedure explicitly provides for the involvement of the First Minister only when the outcome of the investigation is complete. That being so, why did the First Minister consider it appropriate to meet with Alex Salmond not once but three times, have two telephone calls whilst the investigation was on-going? First Minister, I have already responded to that. I was not involved in the procedure. I was not involved in any way in the procedure. I did not intervene in the procedure. I did not seek to intervene. I did not try to influence the course of the investigation. Had I done so, that would have been the subject of absolutely legitimate criticism. All of us reflect on decisions that we take all of the time. I am sure that that will be no different for me in this circumstance as it is on everything else, but I am absolutely satisfied that I acted appropriately and will continue to do so. That concludes questions on the statement. I apologise to Bill Kidd, Daniel Johnson and Rona Mackay, whom I failed to reach. We will now move on to decision time. We turn straight to decision time. The first question is amendment 15243.3, in the name of Jamie Greene, which seeks to amend motion 15243, in the name of Michael Matheson, on ultra-low-emission vehicles, be agreed? Are we all agreed? We are agreed. The next question is amendment 15243.4, in the name of Colin Smyth, which seeks to amend the motion in the name of Michael Matheson, be agreed? Are we all agreed? The next question is amendment 15243.1, in the name of John Finnie, which seeks to amend the motion in the name of Michael Matheson, be agreed? Are we all agreed? Are we all agreed? We are agreed. The next question is amendment 15243.2, in the name of Liam McArthur, which seeks to amend the motion in the name of Michael Matheson, be agreed? Are we all agreed? We are not agreed. We will move to a vote and members may cast their votes now. The result of the vote on amendment 15243.2, in the name of Liam McArthur, is yes, 50, no, 67. There were no abstentions and the amendment is therefore not agreed. The final question is that motion 15243, in the name of Michael Matheson, as amended on ultra-low-emission vehicles, be agreed? Are we all agreed? We are agreed. That concludes decision time. We will move in a few moments to members' business in the name of Brian Whittle on Transport Infrastructure in South West Scotland. We will just take a few moments for members to change seats and for the ministers to change seats too.


Hello, I'm Dr. Gregory Doubt, and I'm an orthopedic trauma surgeon with Mid-Michigan Health and a member of the Comprehensive Musculoskeletal Team. As an orthopedic trauma surgeon, I specialize in complex injuries to the musculoskeletal system such as fractured bones and dislocated joints as well as soft tissue injuries. Trauma can range from low energy fractures as seen in elderly patients to multiple injuries and open fractures such as those caused by a traffic accident or fall. In every situation, my goal is to attain the highest level of function for my patients while minimizing their risk. If non-surgical options are likely to bring equivalent results, I will recommend them over surgery. I seek to create partnerships with my patients by explaining different options and offering suggestions, but I ultimately allow them to make decisions about their own care. The most satisfying aspect of my job is the interpersonal connections that I have with my patients, their family members, and other medical professionals. I find it very rewarding to watch my patients progress from loss of function back to regaining the use of their limbs.


My name is Melissa Armo, and I own a company called the Stock Swoosh LLC. I'm here today to discuss to you an upcoming webinar and invite you to come. It is called Follow Hedge Fund Money in the Market to make $1,000 a day consistently. I own a company called the Stock Swoosh LLC, and if you'd like more information, you can go to my website, www.thestockswoosh.com, or email me at Melissa at thestockswoosh.com as well. I have tons of videos on YouTube. You can go there and just subscribe. Any market videos, plays of the days, or prior webinars that I have posted there you can watch. The webinar is July 20th of Monday at 4.30 Eastern Time. Just click on this link here, and you can go and sign up. Registration is free. So the webinar is going to be about control. We were talking about this today in the live training room. Someone asked me a question. It really is about control. Who's controlling the money in the market? Do you need a trading strategy that will make you money in the market, not only money but consistent money? That's the key here, because everybody has days where they make some money. You need to be consistent, okay? Would you like to learn a way to trade that is both effective and efficient? Well, I trade in this manner, never more so than 2015, I tell you. I was so disciplined today. Do you understand how important it is to take valid trades that have the money behind them, okay? Because hedge funds move the market. Hedge funds move stocks, and you've got to learn how to trade alongside them for profit. Becoming a successful trader and investor requires becoming a specialist in defining where hedge funds are buying or selling a stock. Learning advanced technical analysis is required to read charts in this fashion. And we'll talk about that in the webinar too. Comprehending how to redefine and trade with this parallel have a huge positive impact on your profitability as a trader. 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Learning how to make money is key, because doing something for weeks and months and days and years that you're not making money in really can affect you emotionally, not only financially, but emotionally. And then it affects your confidence, your conviction, your belief system in the market. And I'm turning people's belief systems in the market around by giving them the conviction and the confidence to trade by calling trades in live time that work and also by actually teaching them a system that works. Here's a great example of institutional money in the market. This is a long, this is Netflix, but I have been calling Netflix higher. It has earnings out tonight, I believe, either tonight or tomorrow night. No, it's tomorrow night, the 15th. And Netflix is a great example of hedge funds that we're purchasing and buying the stock, okay? Because the stock gapped up here. This is back at the beginning of the year in January 2015. And it's had a beautiful run since then. It's more than almost doubled its price, which is phenomenal, okay? It was around 400 something here, it was up around 716 the other day. So this is a great example of the power of hedge fund money in the market. And if you were on Netflix, how you could have just rode this puppy out. So we'll talk about that in the webinar. It's really about empowering yourself and you've gotta do it today. Because third quarter earnings season is here. Before you know it, it'll be fall. I actually got an email today about buying pumpkin candles. And I'm like, I'm not ready to be buying pumpkin candles yet. Even though I love pumpkin candles. Before you know it, fall, I'll be around the corner. But let's live in the now, let's live in the moment. It's third quarter, it's July, it's summer, it's a gorgeous day in New York. I'm about ready to go out and lay out in the beautiful, beautiful space in my building. Enjoy yourself, okay, this summer. Make money trading so that you can live a better quality life. And get on the right path to success. I will see everyone on Monday, July 20th, 4.30 Eastern Time. Go to this link right here to register to sign up. Again, it is free, you just have to sign up ahead of time. And if you're interested in more information, email me at melissaatthestalkswish.com if you'd like more information on the upcoming webinar or on the strategy that I trained and teach. Feel free to reach out to me at melissaatthestalkswish.com. Have a great day, everyone.


Do you hear that? Do you hear that? I did hear that. I heard the sound of a droid say recording in progress, recording in progress. Reminds me of many a night with your mom. She very robotic. No, we record stuff.  I'm Rick. And you can also Instagram, Twitter for more juicy content. Thank you to everybody who supports us on Patreon. Follow us on our official Twitter account. Subscribe in if you haven't hit that like button because it helps out the algorithm. And that's what we all want. Inflation's going awry, you know, doesn't matter or three could happen. As long as we all help the algorithm. It's really all that matters. I don't know if you guys knew this, but on Corbin's headstone, he wants to say he helped the algorithm. Exactly. Today, this dropped two days ago. Sorry for just getting to it. Once again, I was sick, which is why we are on Skype. We will get back shortly to in person, but it's called Welcome to the Jungle. Welcome three, which is the third installment of the welcome movies, which we have seen absolutely none. But we know the song very well. Yeah. And this is actually, I believe this is a official announcement. So it doesn't come out till next Christmas is what it says. The 20th of next 2024. I believe this is a song. And so it does have Akshay. I think he's in all the welcomes, correct me if I'm wrong there, please. So you guys could tell us if we should start the series. So when it comes out, we can watch it, if not, obviously, whatever. But it also apparently has a whole bunch of other people. Like it's a massive cast. Massive, massive cast. And so I'm guessing we'll recognize some people. There is some dialogue that's in the middle. Unfortunately, it's not subbed.  Like they don't want like India is not the second largest English-speaking nation in the world.  But apparently most of it is a song. So they've got a whole year to put subs in there, man. I suppose. All right, ready? Yeah. Three, two, one. That's Sanjay Dutt right next to him. Oh, that's, that's that's that's that's that's that. Zaddy up on the corner. That's Johnny Lever as well. Brother, what are you doing? Brother, you don't sing well. Why do you ruin the other's songs?  I'm not talking to you. Who took you both to the movie?  Last time in our industry, Apple was playing and you guys started playing. What did you say? Apple didn't play, brother. They were saying the same thing. Yeah, me too, right?  You tell me. Uncle, what's this? You're going to embarrass me. Ready, one, two, three, four. Yeah. Oh, solo performance is going on. No, solo performance is going on. The chorus is going on. The chorus is going on. The chorus is going on. Yes, solo performance is going on.  Yes, we understand. Come on, let's start. Learn. Learn from old rice like us. Ready? One, two, welcome three. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. I really wish we knew what they were saying, obviously. I know. It seems like there's a lot of comedy there. You notice the rooster? The rooster was cockadoodle doing right at the end with them? Yeah. I don't know how they got the rooster to do it on cue. Not the sound, the actual rooster just before it went to the sound of the rooster. When they were holding out that note, the rooster started. I think it's a fake rooster. Well, it was a great fake rooster. And let me tell you, that was clearly... It's going to be one of the most grounded, serious... No, absolutely not. Welcome to the jungle. No. Welcome. Welcome. I'm trying to find it on IMDB. Why was the guy in the top right turned around the entire time? Your guess is as good as mine. It also in the top left, it looked like Zaddy, but I don't think it was. It wasn't. I double-checked it first. At first, it looked like him, but I double-checked that it was not. You know, it was really nice that all of the ladies had the midriff sewing. Why didn't any of the guys? This one guy would have been great to have one guy with his midriff shoals. Yeah, I would love to see... Actually, he's made drift for sure. Come on. Hold on. Is it not... Okay, there it is. I was like, it's not even on IMDB. It is. Welcome to the jungle. Ahmed Khan. Why do I know that name? Let's see. He directed Begui and Kick. So he's an action director, it looks like. Let's see here. They're very strange that you would put that together this far, 15 months away from your police day. Well, they just want people to know. And it's a... I know it's a popular comedy series, just like Houseful. Yeah. Right. Houseful is another... I think it has like five or so now. Yeah. And so, and it's Akshay, a big cast. And so they just want to start the hype, I guess. I guess so. It didn't cost him probably very much to get all those people together and just film this. And anytime anybody's talking about something for the next year, especially Akshay, if he's doing interviews, it becomes a topic of conversation because it's out the open now. Yeah. And so the cast Sanjay Dutt. Yeah. I saw Sanjay Dutt. I saw... Let's see. Oh, Jackie Fernandez, I guess is in there. I didn't catch her though. Yeah. Not knowing the other films, obviously, this clearly conveys. This is a silly movie that's just for you to have a good time. Yeah. Circuit, who is Arshad Warsh. I apologize. Did you say Johnny Lever was in there? I didn't notice it. Yeah. Johnny Lever was in there. Oh, wow. I don't know how I missed it. Ravina Tandon. It looks like Bobby Dole was in there. Wow. A whole bunch of different people. I'm sure we didn't recognize it all because we're dumb. Oh, Dollar Mendy as well. Yeah. I love the... That was great. You do... Obviously, you guys have to tell us how the welcome series is, if it's one that's worth a watch. Yeah. The thing that would concern me with this is like, you have too many cooks in the kitchen. And it's like... But I don't know anything about the series. Maybe the whole series is like that.  I don't know. Yeah. I don't know anything about this series. So you guys need to educate us in that way. But that would be the concern. Is that you have all these people just for the sake of having all these people instead of the comedy. But I don't know anything. That would probably be my one concern outside of not knowing anything else about the film at all. Welcome came out in when? Well, it was the original. Because I think we've seen a song or two from the welcome movie. When was that? That one? I'm bugging myself, obviously. Yes, you are. 2007 was the first welcome. Okay. Wow. And it does have an Akshay. Akshay Katrina. Between the first one and this one. Akshay Katrina Kaif Nani Petakar Anil Kapoor. Sanjay Mestra. A lot of people in this first one. Yeah. Om Puri.  Vijay Raj. Zenit. The first one's synopsis for the first one. A man falls in love with a beautiful woman, but later discovers that her brothers are gangsters. My bet is that they each don't have anything to do with each other. Because I think the Houseful series also doesn't have anything to do with each other. Okay. But I don't know. Anyways, but it was, it was funny and cute. I wish I knew what they were saying. Let us know what they were saying. Obviously in the comments below so we could figure out in which we, if we should watch the welcome series, obviously, please let us know if this one, if not, which we are next Akshay film that we should watch. Let us know down below.