Hi, everyone. This week, Dorman and I chat with Mick Friedman and Joey Sabani, members of the Agile Practice Leadership Enablement Team, about Pivotal's work with Accenture, the global consulting firm. The two talk about how the Accenture Pivotal Business Group and the Innovation Hub in Columbus, Ohio, are helping our joint clients transform how they build software at scale. Enjoy. Hi, my name's Mick Friedman. I'm a director for the Agile Practice Leadership Enablement Team. I've been with Pivotal for a number of years, starting out as a software engineer in the New York Labs office and working my way up through the ranks. I've been part of the Apple team now since January this year, 2018. And I think we should just, for the sake of our audience, go ahead and disambiguate that accent. I mean, it's pretty disambiguous, right? Unless you think Kiwis sound like Australians. I thought you were Icelandic. Or is it Icelandic? I thought you were from Texas. I am from the main streets of Melbourne, Australia, for those of you playing along at home. I went to a cool bar there once. Isn't it like a chemistry lab? That place is actually really cool. There's like fake grass on the bar. Joey, how about you? Hi, everyone. Joey Sabani. I've been with Pivotal for a couple of years, almost going on three years, I think. Started off as a labs engineer. Joined the Apple team with Mick in January. I'm not from Melbourne, Australia. Nothing else, I think, crazy coming out. But that's pretty much it for me. Okay. Yeah, we'll find the crazy eventually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It comes out. Okay, so you guys both mentioned you're on the Apple team. We're going to set that aside. That's a four-letter acronym that starts with an A. And we'll get to that. But there's another four-letter acronym that starts with an A that I want to disambiguate first. So that's APBG.
2:04You might have heard APBG mentioned on the quarterly earnings call for Pivotal by our CEO, Rob May. It stands for Accenture Pivotal Business Group. And so it's a collaboration between our two companies, between Pivotal and Accenture, that sort of really kicked off in earnest late 2017. So we signed something and it was official in the public eye November 2017. And we've been working on helping build out that partnership from a service offering standpoint. Well, so I kind of want to talk a little bit like, let's get like a practical example of what that means. Because it's, you know, businessy business, business, business, business. It's like a being John Malkovich movie. Let me paint you a word picture. Accenture and Pivotal, we have a mutual financial services client here on the East Coast. They're operating at a scale that Pivotal Labs organization, which is our consulting business, would struggle to meet the demand of, you know, should the leadership at that organization decide that everyone needs to go and have a Labs experience. For those of you who aren't too familiar with what Labs offers, you know, it's an XP-based one-to-one pairing enablement model where folks come into our offices here in various cities. You know, 19, I forget what our account is right now, different offices and people come and meet us here. So we couldn't possibly hope to meet that scale, right? And so this client actually said to Accenture and Pivotal, Hey, you guys, we know you have a great relationship. You know, the ex-executives from Accenture are sitting on our board as a tight and close relationship. You need to go put your heads together and figure out what does it mean for you all to work together to help enable us be successful, right? And so, you know, we've been working very closely through our global ecosystem team with various global SI partners, right? And so it's a pretty well-established pattern that we use to sort of lead with Pivotal and deliver through our partner relationships, which makes a lot of sense. But this felt slightly different. And the thing that's really exciting about it is that there was a deliberate decision made by both of our executives to invest in
4:08Pivotal style, Pivotal-inspired service offerings. And I think that's the subtlety and the nuance that's different about this, right? So there was an acknowledgement that to deliver a lab-style experience of enablement for both app transformation and traditional labs work. You would need to invest in that to enable the Accenture people, right? Which is how Joey and I sort of on the ground there. So going back to that practical example of the financial services firm, you know, we've been jointly delivering work for that organization now for most of the year. And the current engagement we have underway has the client onsite in Columbus, Ohio, akin to a situation that you would have here in New York. You know, the client is onsite. And the APBG people are a combination of Pivotal employees and Accenture employees jointly enabling the client to successfully deliver working software, right? And the same model that Pivotal Labs has success with at our other clients. Okay. So just to sort of recap that a little bit, as opposed to sort of the handoff model where a client might engage with us first and sort of get things going from an Agile XP transformation perspective, working with Pivotal Labs, and then when they're ready to scale that, there's sort of a clean handoff to a global SI, for example. In this case, it's like there's a blended approach where they're, whether it's their first or a subsequent engagement, they're still engaged directly with Pivotal by way of this APBG group, but they're now starting to work with a large-scale global provider. You mentioned Columbus, Ohio, right? We don't have a Pivotal Labs office there. I remember there was an announcement back in February, so it's been less than a year since that office officially opened. What's been going on there? What's happened?
6:08What's going on in Columbus, Ohio, beautiful Columbus, Ohio? I think since February, Mick and I have been on site with other colleagues of ours, actually a bunch of pivots throughout the time, and one of our other colleagues, Daniel, that's not here with us right now, but is enjoying the beautiful beaches of Australia somewhere. We went on site, and our goal was basically, like we would with any one of our labs, we wanted to help Accenture build up their lab and have their lab with, I don't, we don't have like a term, like we have pivots for Pivotal folks, but just Accenture folks that could deliver products and the product team in a balanced team setting like we do, so helping them scale up their XP practice or build an XP practice from the ground up, helping them build a lean product practice, and instituting new roles like product designers. While we were doing that, we were helping them build and shape their organizational structure and kind of enabling them on some of the skills that we have in unique ways that we source work to be the right kind of work for us in labs, which is, you know, things like scopings or the pre-sales activities that we do, where Mick and I were working with the leadership team there to ensure that they could source and deliver the work in a way that represents how Pivotal would if it was one of our labs. Yeah, I think that's the really key point there. If you think about where Columbus is geographically, Dormean, you're exactly right, like we don't really have even an office that's terribly close to there, right? So, you know, New York is 800, 900 miles away or whatever it is, right? And that's probably one of the closer offices. And, you know, so it represented an area of the country where we had clients who had presence and we had people who we'd worked with and partnered with on delivering, you know, capabilities around the platform and other services, on-site services, but we didn't really have that sort of Pivotal Labs experience for that sort of, call it Midwest slash Great Lakes region. And so the Columbus office that Accenture had begun to create represented an amazing opportunity for both our companies, right? So it was an area where they were already invested
8:12in building what they call an innovation hub. And we had a white space gap or a gap in our coverage of the country in that region. And so we were able to, exactly how Joey described, we were able to go there, work with them to see that office as if it were a new labs office being kicked off. And that's the thing, again, to sort of go back to like what differentiates this partnership from other partnerships that we may have. You know, it's that extra level of education and enablement around what it means to run an office in the Pivotal style. And so help me understand the, how Accenture helps scale, helps our customers scale. So in this particular environment, there's both Pivotal and Accenture folks. Is the idea that the customer will come there and do some engagements there and eventually there will be a handoff to Accenture? I'm just trying to understand the life cycle. Yeah. I mean, the great thing is that, you know, when we set the partnership up, we were fairly open-minded as to the form that it could take. So the contracting between our company allows for a very flexible approach to delivery of that work. And so it could well, you know, we would, the genesis of it was to allow our customers to leverage existing relationships for either company rather than have to negotiate with a new entity that had been created, right? So it was very much meant to operate in that transparent way. And so, you know, to that end, we have many different service offerings that the hub offers to our clients, right? We have folks from that hub who are on site with customers delivering, helping to deliver dojo work, you know, Pivotal-led and that traditional partner play or approach. We also have people on site at Columbus being enabled as if they would, you know, as they would be at a Chicago Labs office or an SF Labs office. We also have teams in Columbus who have no client present who aren't focused on enablement, but rather focused on delivery, providing those clients with
10:14some extra capacity that they need to sort of get them through this period as they build new software. Yeah. And when we think about like how, you know, Jeff, how does this, how are they helping our clients, our partners and customers and stuff like that? And we think about a global organization that has reach that far expands and extends ours. And, you know, what we're trying to do is we're trying to, we're really trying to show people a new and exciting way to build software on a platform that allows you to move really quickly. And this is all in service of enabling Accenture the same way where we kind of help our labs and engineers and developer or product teams to like to help people really push forward on the platform. What Mick was talking about, you know, like helping drive workload and all those kinds of things. So kind of helping our customers achieve some of those goals and some of those pivotal goals that we have as well. But yeah, they have the scale and the reach that that pivotal does not have as a services team. So, so what kind of progress have you guys seen come out of the engagements that are happening there? I mean, Ryan Johnson from the APPG group spoke at Spirman platform. And I mean, I remember he had a really hilarious story about in order to kind of force this change amongst some of the developers on his team, he literally had to steal their keyboards, like half the keyboards that they were forced to pair and stuff like that. I mean, it was great. But stepping back, where, how far have things come in the less than a year in the sort of building out? And as you said, kind of enabling Accenture in the same way as you enable labs? Yeah, I think, yeah, Ryan is actually someone that I work closely with every day when we were over there and stuff. And just as like a peer to me and the PL practice lead, the practice lead for engineering. So yeah, when, when we kind of started and everything was getting going, we were trying to just like when a client comes to pivotal labs, they they're trying to learn a new way to kind of develop software and build products. And so the lab itself was not used to this. So yeah, we had to do
12:16some pretty drastic things like, you know, removing keyboards just to kind of encourage pairing as XP was as top of mind. And that development cycle, but other things that are really exciting is like the look and feel and how we kind of started building this to, to kind of echo and resemble another pivotal labs office, right, where, where things like the daily stand up, you know, they're using our same structure of helps, interesting, new faces and events, you know, and I think a lot of the I'm putting agile ceremonies in quotes, just because of that term, but, you know, things that this is a company in an organization that followed scrum pretty well. So they, they understood a lot of the ceremonies, but I think it was kind of bringing them into the pivotal lifestyle and how we see these items. Also changing organizational structure, org chart to kind of help mimic, not necessarily exactly like ours, but you know, like to help Accenture build what what makes sense to them, but allows for individuals to be promoted on, and kind of recognize for their work in different ways. You know, the way that we work in labs as we pair all day and a flatter organizational structure, it means that individual contributors that used to be probably like heroes, you know, I worked till two in the morning to make sure the system was up and I was applauded and awarded for that. That behavior, you know, it's something that, you know, we at Pivotal try not to applaud, you know, like, hey, it's systemic of a bigger, larger problem. We don't want you to be applauded for staying till two in the morning every day. That's not great. So let's figure out a way to kind of spread that knowledge and, you know, collaborate and kind of build some of that stuff. And they're starting to become that. And to do that, you know, we learned it's not only, hey, this is how you pair program, or this is how, you know, this is what we would do in user research, but it's also like, we need to, we needed to make organizational structure and change as well. That's something that Mick and I helped the organization focus on in the first couple months that we were there as well. And that we've seen that change come pretty well now to like, you know, there's, there's people that are managing engagements, and there's people are stepping up into new roles, and there's new promotional charts that exist because of this. So I think one of the
14:17things we have to, that we have to remember that's really exciting is that Accenture is also a consulting firm. And if we take the metric of, you know, number of people at the company, or how much revenue is generated, very, very successful consulting firm. So we have Joey and myself and our other team members, we, you know, had a lot to learn about what it was, what it means to operate an office at scale, right? I have a lot of experience from helping to run the labs office here in New York. But it was definitely augmented by being on the ground there with the Accenture team. And, you know, sort of further to the idea that they're also consultants, one of the characteristics of being a consultant is always learning, and always being open to trying new things, right? It's very, very important to our culture, and it's important, I think, to most consulting firms. And so one of the things that differentiated this, for me, from a regular engagement is that we were able to sort of discuss ideas, you know, show people a different approach. And the folks on the ground there took that and ran with it, you know, in a sometimes very enthusiastic way that we don't even see in our own offices, right? Joey mentioned earlier that, you know, stand-ups have started to look a little bit more collaborative and a little bit more like pivotal stand-ups. That's great, you know. But even, you know, even other aspects of office organization and, you know, execution have been taken and adapted from the pivotal model and started to take on a life at the room, which is super exciting as well. What does that mean practically? Okay, if I compare sales activity on the ground in February to now, I think the biggest difference is that we've helped the technical pre-sales and pre-sales teams orient themselves around delivering outcomes, business outcomes for clients, mutual clients, and doing that by creating lightweight proposals that deliver working software more quickly, right? Accenture's big strength, and the thing that they're really, really great at is meeting these larger organizations at the scale that they need and being able to offer and commit to multi-year, you know, multifaceted engagements in a way that we can't or won't do, right? And we have to respect their
16:18ability to do that, right? And so what we were trying to do is show them a flavor of what a more lightweight approach would look like, and to their credit, they've sort of taken that on board and made it a part of the way that they sell to their customers. You have to remember that the innovation hub itself and the leadership they're in are fighting an internal marketing battle with the Accenture organization, not only, you know, let alone the clients, right? Right. And isn't even just the delivery model is very different, right? Accenture consultants typically go to the customer side. And in this case, you're having the customer come to them. And so they've got all these ways of working that the larger company uses and has for years. And as you said, they're they're trying something new. And I'm sure they're like any company, there's going to be pockets of of resistance and questioning, you know, why are we doing this kind of thing? So I'm sure they've they've had to fight some of those battles. I mean, the great news, the great news there, Jeff, is that, you know, Accenture is by and large going to be very data driven when it comes to these business groups, right? They have a handful of there aren't there aren't a ton. They when they create them, they believe that that's because there's going to be an uptick in specific business related to that company organizational product. And they expect to see that growth year over year. And if they don't see it, then the business group doesn't go anywhere and it gets it gets closed, right? So we're at a really interesting point right now where we're sort of on an upward stick of momentum and we're getting great exposure in the industry. I know I mentioned sort of half tongue in cheek before that, you know, Rob May, our CEO, brought it up on the earnings call. That's the second time he's done that, you know, out of three earnings calls so far. It's really, really important to the success of Pivotal that partnerships like this succeed. And we're hoping that it shows Accenture a new and exciting way to deliver software for their customers as well. So there's kind of nested layers of success in that, right? You've got
18:21Pivotal success, but you've got part of that means we have to help make Accenture successful, right? And they're going to be looking at that. And in order to do that, we have to together make the customer successful. And so looking at things in terms of, you know, the change in the proposal model and the whole kind of orientation of how we engage on projects with these end users and customers is sort of the ultimate driver for all these other kind of nested layers of success, you know, all kind of coming back to that. You know, without names or anything, but can you point to examples of some of the joint customer work that you've seen where we really, together as part of this partnership, help deliver those kinds of successful outcomes for customers? Yeah, I mean, a lot of that stuff is still in process right now. I mean, like it's still happening as we speak. I would say that, you know, we've one of the things that Pivotal sometimes has challenges around is how to kind of kick off and begin a transformation engagement in service of creating a set of applications that are ready for our platform. And, you know, to, you know, through the APBG group, we've been able to kick off a few engagements in insurance and financial services for app transformation. And then in the hub itself, which is on site at the hub location, you know, we've also been working again with sort of similar, the similar group of folks, financial services, financial services has a big presence in Columbus, which is why I keep coming back to it. Traditionally, a lot of financial services slash insurance companies are based in that region. So one of the things that's also very encouraging is that there are, the hub itself has several engagements that aren't necessarily, haven't necessarily been originated through or have been deliberately a part of the APBG partnership, but a sort of APBG
20:23adjacent, if you will. And we've been able to start driving more successful outcomes for those engagements as well, right? One of the things that I think makes pivotal differentiates us in the marketplace when it comes to delivering successful labs and our transformation engagements is that sales and qualification process. Teaching Accenture how to do that has been super valuable, I think, to them. And I'm hoping going forward that it will lead to a lot more successful engagements for our mutual customers. But even in the context of traditionally sold Accenture engagements, we've been able to affect some real change in those success metrics as well, which has been really encouraging. So much so that we're sort of creating some service offerings that are unique to Accenture that fit, that sort of fit that. And Jeff, it sort of bridges that model between your traditional sort of like take the consultants and put them on site versus come and do enablement at the Pivotal Labs office. Yeah, we have, we actually have a few pretty unique cases of success that, you know, again, like not speaking really towards the clients, but speaking towards the success that we've had using the platform as a catalyst of, we've, you know, there's a couple of teams on site that have some really big wins this last quarter, one of them being they got an app into production at a client that traditionally takes, takes a long enough time, but it was like a record for not only us at Pivotal getting an app into production at this client, but Accenture as a whole as well, which was about 10 weeks, we have an app in production, which is pretty amazing. And then the other one using XP and TD shipping to the platform, another team was able to go to production and be the only team that did not have any, I believe they didn't have any bugs or like any setbacks, which is like, which was the first time that's ever happened inside of this group as well. So they were able to ship something that no one found an issue with, which is very unrared, but, you know, leveraging techniques that Mick myself and the rest of the team have been kind of
22:26enabling the team with and putting them on the platform and being able to kind of like test that stuff faster. That engagement is an example of a stakeholder group from the client who didn't really care either way how the software was delivered, you know, different from a traditional labs engagement where we have to get those folks to buy into the approach because it's so different. They were like, all right, you want to do that stuff, go do it, we don't really care. And then they saw the outcomes that were being driven, the successful outcomes that were being driven. And now we're starting to get traction in that group for the whole approach. All right, so it was kind of like thin edge of the wedge of XP practices that helped drive success there, which is really exciting. Okay, so let's kind of circle around to the second four-letter acronym starting with an A, which is technically the role that you both have, Apple. I can't even remember what it stands for, so you're going to have to, you're going to have to help us out with that one. So tell us about what that is and then let's talk about what that means for all the work that you've just been describing. Yeah, Agile Practice Leadership Enablement, APLE, a new group that is actually, you know, not a new concept inside of Pivotal, something that's been going on for quite some time. The work that was done here in Chicago with a group that we had called POD, which was Pivotal Onsite Delivery. The name had changed because we have a lot of onsite delivery and we weren't the only ones, but you know, kind of the origination has been going on for a couple of years. We've been doing this at larger clients in some way, form or fashion. I think just recently this year, we've kind of like formalized this process. And so my role on that team is as a practice lead. And I work with Mick, and Mick is a delivery lead. Our teams are pretty small. We go on site and we, like I was kind of mentioning before, we were working with Accenture and building and kind of working with their leadership level. We do less one-to-one pairing as is traditional inside of Pivotal and more one-to-many, one-to-many coaching pairing and kind of enablement in that aspect. And, you know, success for us, I think,
24:26is, I think varies based upon any client that we might have. And, you know, we're working with our partners, but also with some of our large clients as well inside of this group. And I think what we're trying to do is make sure that we're leaving them in a place where they can have a sustainable product practice and also learn from them, right? Like, I think it's interesting because here at Labs, we do a lot in a very opinionated way. And, you know, we've shown a lot of success over many years and how we kind of build software. But we've iterated on it and we've grown. And, you know, we have the opportunity, me, Mick, and our colleagues to kind of go on site and say, "Hey, giant organization, you're clearly successful at what you're doing." You know, like you couldn't have made it here if you weren't, but you see something in us and the way that we build software and you want to do it on your own. So let's help them like kind of build and learn together, which is really exciting to me. And I think that's like kind of like the, this idea of building more of these pivotal labs like offices where everyone's kind of building software in a similar way that's kind of been adapted to the way that they, that makes sense inside of their organization. So, I mean, just to, just to draw like a little bit of a clearer line, because, you know, Pivotal Labs has been doing this for a long time and has a very particular approach, right? Where it's like, you know, come to our house, play by our rules. And it's this immersive sort of experience. So as you described, the agile practice leadership enablement is more about being on site of the customer. So inverting some of that. What exactly is the problem that you're solving with that? Yeah, it's a great question. And I would say that, you know, the, the model that we've been very successful with at Pivotal Labs has been, as you described, bringing customers into our environment. You know, what is the thing that makes that really successful? We get folks away from their day-to-day, we get them away from their meetings and so on. We show them the art of the possible. We show them what, what 100% or 110% of everything looks like, right? What does it mean if you radically redesign your workspace? What does it mean if you do X, Y, Z thing? And that's great. And we do drive success
26:30for individual teams for our customers. What we have known, have noticed and organically have acknowledged over the years is that that doesn't get our customers the whole way there to a transformative journey. And, you know, Joey mentioned the Pivotal on-site delivery model that was, that was sort of spearheaded out of Chicago there. And there have been other attempts with other large organizations that we've worked with to sort of, to sort of do the responsible thing and help our customers transition back to their environment and build an environment conducive to this type of work. There's a lot of organizational change management activities that go into creating a successful agile environment. And it's, and I think what we realized as a company is increasingly, it was irresponsible for us to send back a small successful agile team to be ground up in the machinery of a traditional environment. I think what's appealing about joining this team for a lot of folks who've been at labs is the, is acknowledging that, is acknowledging that like, we can take some, we can work with folks for 12, you know, 12 weeks to six months to a year or what have you. And they'll have a lot of fun. And then for most of the engagement, they're sitting with us saying, geez, I really, I'm not looking forward to going home. Like, I'm not looking forward to going back. And so the great opportunity that we have with the agile practice team is to be able to continue that relationship and help the customers on that second part of their customer journey, that sort of ingrained step. So it's a very complimentary to the work that the transformation team does. Because Joey alluded to this earlier saying, it's less about for our team, there's only, you know, a handful of us go onto these onsite delivery engagements. We're working with a very, by that, by the very nature of the size of our team, we're working with a small group of folks from the client side. And often that means we're working with people who are in that, you know, have been identified, hopefully with us, as, as leaders for the practice of say, engineering, or the practice of product design, and so on. We're really trying to create that, the safe environment for multiple agile teams to continue on their journey, right? One of the things I think
28:30that is, you know, really, really important or integral to a successful agile delivery model is budgeting, right? But that's often not a conversation that our team is willing and able to have here on the ground at Pivotal Labs. And that's, that's an example of something that I think, you know, we, we, we try and get up, get ourselves involved. Okay. So just, and this is, this is where my, my Greek tragedy example, after kind of hearing a, a preview of this. So that, that, like, situation you described, Mick, right, where, what we've experienced with labs, um, and where a, a, a developer is on a labs engagement, and they're coming into the labs office, and they're pairing 100% of the time, and they're doing stand-ups, and retros, and iteration plans, and test development, and they're, they're cranking through writing code, like, at a much higher rate, in terms of the amount of time they actually get to spend doing that, as opposed to, you know, all the other stuff, the meetings, and the, the back and forth, and the wait for the tickets. They get a taste of that, and then, then they have to go home. And so this is, like, I don't know, did anyone here take, like, classics, or read any of the, the Greek tragedies, right? So, you know, the story of Agamemnon, and, and this is kind of, like, a big cycle, right? Like, you can't even pin this to just one Greek play, because it shows up in multiple plays, and the Iliad, and whatever, right? So Agamemnon was the, the Greek king who lead the troops' sales to Troy for the Trojan War, right? So he has Achilles, um, and Ajax on his team. Those are some of his top warriors, and those are the names folks are familiar with. So, um, but, you know, the Trojan War is like a 20-year war, and so it's a huge chunk of their life that they're overseas fighting this overseas war. And then, you know, that sort of becomes your identity after a while. So there's in, um, in the Oresteia, which is, uh, kind of a
30:30trilogy of plays. I won't get into how plays were performed in trilogies, but that's how it works. They, they invented it, and now, like, they sign, like, actors when they sign up for a, a big blockbuster, they have to sign a contract that they're going to do all three movies, even if they don't even know if they're going to make all three. Anyways, it all, we didn't invent that. Anyways, so, and one of those stories, first of all, the back story is that to get to the winds to change so they sail to Troy, he has to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia. So folks may have read Iphigenia in, in, you know, I read it in high school. I have been on some, I've been on some hairy engagements at Pivotal Labs, but I've never sacrificed anyone. It's like, spoiler alert, she, she pulls through, right? But I'm just going to leave it at that. So his wife, Clytemnestra, which is like, that's a name, right? She's not too happy about this. Like, they have three kids, and it's like, dude, you just, you sacrificed our daughter so that you could go help your brother get his, like, unfaithful wife back? Hashtag not worth it. So, when he comes back, like 20 years later, she kills him, right? And so it's basically like in the kind of, when people talk about, you know, Greek tragedies, it's like the father kills one of the daughters, and then the wife kills the father, and then, you know, I'm not going to tell, break, you know, spoiler, like, who kills who next, but you can kind of see where this is going. But, anyways, when I was studying this in college, we talked about it a lot as like this transition back for Agamemnon and his team was like, we haven't lived in domestic life for 20 years. We've been in, you know, bunkers, whatever the ancient Greek equivalent of a bunker is, and living the soldier life and all this stuff, and, you know, now we gotta transition back. Anyways, so that's kind of like my, my long Greek tragedy analogy. So, like, how do we, how do we have people come back and not have Clyde Mnestra stab him in the bathtub? I mean, yeah, it does come back to it. I mean, there are
32:30only like, what, there are only 14 real narratives in all of fiction, right? And one of them is human versus Clyde Mnestra. Yeah, yeah. And another one, a machine comes and takes the end of the story away. Wait a minute. All right, so I would say, I would say that, you know, the Apple team is, is uniquely placed to help aid that transition. This is something that we battled for so long as humans. Yeah, and we still battle it. I would say some of the things that, that the reason, the benefit to coming to an on-site location, as I sort of described earlier, right? We get people out of their environment, we show them the art of the possible, the way things could be. It's hard to go, it's hard to go back to an environment where you, where you are able to see, you know, the veils being pulled back from your eyes, you're able to see just how inefficient and hard the original environment was that you came from. And this is the part that I think that as a, as an organization, we tried for a long time to not acknowledge. We tried for a long time to say, this isn't our problem. And I think what makes a team like Apple interesting is that we're trying to acknowledge that together with our customers, we will work out a plan to make this sustainable long term. And in traditional labs consulting argument, we don't have all the answers. It depends. But what we do know is we have a lot of experiences that we can draw on. And we can work with our clients to try and create something that is an amalgam of the realities of their situation, and what we think to be the best, right? We ask clients when they come on site with us to suspend their disbelief. We ask them to say, I have all this stuff I need to do, but I'm not going to do it for 12 weeks, for 12 weeks, I'm gonna do it your way. And then oftentimes we say to them, you know what, go back to your place of business, take what you've learned and try and adapt it yourself into your workflow and your software development lifecycle. And that doesn't always go so well. I mean, don't get me wrong, there's been a lot of successes. But you know, for some of these people who are
34:32trying to affect change at a large level, you know, this 1000, tens of thousands of developers sort of organizations that we were talking about in the beginning, that doesn't, you know, there needs to be a bit more strategy, there needs to be a bit more organizational change management. And that's the area I think that we can make the biggest difference, right? And we're trying to fight an asymmetric battle or against certain processes and practices inside organizations by consulting with and working with very small leadership team to create that safe environment. Yeah. So now let's bring that back to what you've been doing on the ground at APBG as, you know, it's different, right? You've got there, it's pivots working alongside Accenture folks on mutual client engagements, right? So how does, are you working more with the Accenture practice lead folks inside, say, the Columbus Innovation Center? Is that where it's like, hey, we want to keep this going and make a safe place for folks to work in, you know, an agile and XP way? Is that kind of where the effort is focused? Yeah, I think, you know, we, we're trying to help them build that, you know, speak to what you just said, we're trying to help them have that like safe and expandable way to continue to grow. And the reason like there are pivots on site is because, you know, we have joint clients that need delivery out of a different location. But also, while Mick and I and our team, again, is working with the leadership group. So not necessarily the people that are actually executing as individual contributors with XP or lean product or UCD. We, we still need people to kind of help enable individuals that have never seen this where in a traditional lab setting or any one of our other Apple APLE clients, they would have gone through years of, I don't think actually either one of our clients, any of our other clients
36:34has not gone through like years of work inside of a lab's office. So they have a bunch of individuals that at least have had great exposure to the, to all of our skills and practices, where inside of Accenture, we, we had the both great fortune, but also the challenge of having a fresh, clean plate of, of, of people that have never, maybe not necessarily, um, they've probably seen some of this stuff, but not in the way of the dial to 11 that we've kind of, um, we're traditionally giving our clients. So, um, we're both helping them, Hey, you know, like, here's like a, a overview of this stuff, but also we're delivering workshops and, and doing some one-to-many enablement and we're, we're helping leverage, um, labs, um, in a way to kind of, you know, both excel our clients, um, journey, um, but also help Accenture kind of learn with bringing in some labs pivots that can pair one to many with, uh, inside of a product team that kind of really accelerates the learning and growth curve. Um, so yeah, our focus, Apple is definitely on helping Accenture, um, kind of build this like sustainable, um, practice of their own that they can hopefully keep expanding and extending. And, and, you know, we're, we hope that we're a part of that journey as well, um, into the, to the future, where there's many of these locations that can help service labs in areas that we pivotal labs that in areas that we are not, um, traditionally servicing and, and help, um, expand into clients that, uh, you know, need more support than we are, we can actually just give them, you know, they need more people. They need, they have lots of projects to do. They, you know, they're looking to move the many workloads onto the platform, you know, cause we're not solely working with them on labs and Mick alluded to this as well, but we also have teams from our FTX and PCFS and everyone else kind of helping enable Accenture into, um, helping our clients along their journey and getting the apps onto the platform, modernizing their development workflow. And so we're, we're helping them in many aspects. And I think, um, it's kind of, that's an exciting thing, but us focus, our, our sole focus is that leadership group in that lab and then extending into more or hub as they call it. Um, and extending into more and more of those. All right. So where do things go from here? What's,
38:36what's next? So currently we're, we're sort of in a phase of, um, establishing that with the, with the, with the leadership groups of both companies. Um, we've seen some really great initial successes there in Columbus, and I think we need to continue investing in success there. Uh, the plan for 2019 is to continue to establish beachheads, if you will, of other pockets of this APPG activity, um, not necessarily at the scale that Columbus is at, um, but much more subject to customer demand. I think one of the, the reason that Columbus represented such a unique opportunity for both our companies was that there was an initial investment made in building an office at that location and it created a sense of its own gravity in the same way that an office would for us. I think the, the plan for 2019 is to continue to build upon that success in Columbus and also look to identify similar areas that could benefit from a geographical, uh, you know, having an office much closer geographically than we do currently. So, you know, really buoyed by the successes we've seen from delivery and really, really pleased to be working with our colleagues at pivotal labs to help jointly deliver work out of the Accenture office. Well, you know, I'd love to see that happen more and more in, in calendar 2019, uh, as we, as we look to enable the Accenture crew, right? Ideal state for us, you know, by the end of whenever it is, you know, by the end of some time period is that, um, a pivotal account team can look to Columbus and say this group, this is functionally equivalent to going to New York, uh, even without pivotal labs employees being on the ground there and doing the work. Who, who, who fills out the W2 shouldn't matter, right? The, the value system and the principles that drive that person should be completely aligned. And that's what we're aiming towards. So it's really a transformation, uh, within Accenture. The people that make up the majority of the hires for the Columbus Innovation Hub from the Accenture side are new to the company and have had their expectations set around the type of work they'll be doing.
40:39And, and, and, you know, to Jeff's point from earlier, uh, most folks who join Accenture expect uh, a level of travel to be part of their day-to-day job and to be on, on site with clients. The folks that were hired into the Columbus Innovation Hub have their expectations set that where they'll, that's where they'll, they'll be for the foreseeable future, right? So that there's a lot of really interesting organizational change that's happening, um, in the, in the Columbus office that gives us a lot of great hope for the future, I'd say. Um, where can folks learn more or keep tabs on, on each of you in like a not creepy internet stalking way? At least at the moment for myself personally, I have like pretty much zero social media presence. I, it's kind of, I'm like one of those kids who's like, you know, you know, I never really had TV growing up. I don't know. Maybe it's just because Mick and I work together so much, but I'm also somebody that doesn't really social media. Um, although I am a person that lives in Chicago and you can find me inside of the Chicago office. Um, all right. Well, thank you for, uh, for, for joining us and, uh, kind of walking us through both of these kind of interesting organizations and practices that, that exist out there and how they're coming together, which is, uh, extra interesting. So, yeah, I'm glad the world now knows about APLE and, uh, maybe there's a little bit more about APBG if they've already heard about it. So thanks for giving us the opportunity to come on here and talk about this. It's very exciting to us and we're, you know, looking forward to, uh, next year.