Welcome, listeners, to the Cloud and Culture Podcast. If you're new, here's the quick background. I'm Danielle Burrow from VMware. And I'm Derek Harris from VMware. And this podcast is focused on VMware Pivotal Labs and the work done by our team of experts to help organizations shift their software development into high gear. As the title suggests, that entails modernizing and sometimes just kickstarting software development and tooling, as well as helping clients create a culture that will allow them to run efficient, self-sufficient software development teams for the long term. This week, we're joined by Ellie Arrera, who runs Pivotal Act at VMware. Pivotal Act is an initiative to help nonprofits from around the world build software to serve their clients and fulfill their missions. Ellie shares her experiences working with these organizations on a wide array of problems and discusses some of the unique challenges that arise when working with sensitive data, at-risk populations, and different geopolitical considerations. She also explains how Pivotal Act prepares its nonprofit clients, which often don't have large software engineering budgets, to keep their work going over the long run. Yeah, it's an insightful discussion, if only because it focuses on a group of users that are far cry from the traditional large enterprises we normally focus on. However, from data privacy to sheer scrappiness, there actually are a lot of lessons that business leaders can learn from their nonprofit counterparts. You can learn more about Pivotal Act, and if you're a nonprofit, reach out to get involved by visiting tanzu.vmware.com slash act, A-C-T. And as always, don't forget to visit tanzu.vmware.com slash labs to learn more about Pivotal Labs and how we can help you kickstart your next project and get better at building software. Well, Ellie, thank you so much for joining us today. Let's just go ahead and jump into it. Could you start us off with just a quick introduction of who you are and your role with Pivotal Act? Yeah, of course. My name's Ellie Herrera, and I'm head of Pivotal Act.
2:01Awesome. And can you give us a little bit of background on what Pivotal Act is? Like, when did it start? And kind of what motivated it to begin? Yeah, so Pivotal Act started really three years ago now. So I was a product manager in Pivotal Labs, now VMware Pivotal Labs. And I ended up doing some work with an organization called the Humanitarian Innovation Fund, and then with the Red Cross. And this was with another colleague, Ali Blenken, at the time. She's since left the company. But together, it was when we were doing that work that we realized that there's an opportunity really to work with nonprofits in a similar way that we work in Pivotal Labs to support them in designing and building technology that can really make a difference and really make an impact. And so we kind of came up with the idea of adapting the services that we have within labs to specifically working with nonprofits to try and drive social impact. And that's really where the idea was born. And what is, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm taking the understanding you are all of Pivotal Act at the moment, correct? Correct, right now. It is me. We're very much in a... I was going to say, how do you scale? Well, yes, we are in startup mode right now. We're like a little startup within a company. But the plan is actually to expand the team and bring on some different roles, which has been really great. But the way that the program is set up is that we don't really need to be a really big team because when we run projects with nonprofits, what we do is we bring in consultants from our different Pivotal Labs offices and teams to work with the nonprofits together. So we actually don't really need to be a huge team ourselves, which is really great. I'm curious what it is. I mean, I think... So if anyone's been listening to this podcast especially, but I think a lot of people listening probably at least have passing familiarity with Pivotal Labs, what's the shift, I guess, when you're working?
4:01Or what's different or unique working with nonprofits compared with a large enterprise, right, or a team within a regular enterprise? Yeah, so there are some differences that we've learned over the past few years from doing this. I think one of the ones that really sticks in my mind is the fact that the organizations that we're working with are often working in quite difficult environments and often working with quite vulnerable people. So to give you an example, we've done projects where we've worked with young people who've been in foster care as they turn 18 and transition out of the care system. That's one example. We've done another project with an organization called the Collaborative Cash Delivery Network, and that was looking at how to coordinate distributing cash in emergencies as part of like a humanitarian response, things like floods and earthquakes. So in those kinds of instances, there are really high stakes involved in that. So what that's meant is for the projects that we do, we really try to make sure that we're building tech in a responsible way. And one of the ways that we do that is by taking a step back and really looking at the whole kind of ecosystem and all the different people that are involved in that to really avoid making any unintended consequences of what it is that we're actually designing and building. We just really want to make sure that we're not really adding any additional harm. And that's something that's actually relevant in all kinds of projects. But I think especially when you're working with traditionally underserved communities, then that's extra important. Well, what's the... I'm curious on that, like, because we hear so much... Speaking of unintended consequences, I mean, that is like in the zeitgeist so much right now due to social media and just a lot of our web and mobile behaviors in general. Like, how do you plan for that? I mean, or what's the process for actually... I'm curious because I think a lot of, you know, frankly, a lot of organizations could stand to think about unintended consequences when they're designing things.
6:02Yeah, I totally agree with you. There's a few different ways of doing that. I think one of the things that we do is... Well, there's one framework that we used is called a future wheel. And that was something that we used on a project quite recently with a nonprofit called A21. And they're really focused on ending slavery. That's their overall mission. We were working with them specifically on creating an online curriculum about human trafficking for young people. The idea being that if they can identify the signs early on and be educated about it, hopefully, you know, it would be less likely to happen. So in thinking about an online curriculum for that, there was a particular feature that the team were looking at. And that was around when you get to like very sensitive parts of the curriculum to allow the students to kind of read through and step through that part on their own, but then have an opportunity to message privately with the teacher or the educator. And they came up with that idea because that's quite similar to how other sensitive topics are taught like sex education. So what they did was, okay, let's think about that. Now let's play forward all the potential things that could happen if we actually build out that feature. So it's quite a sort of speculative, forward-thinking approach. And they actually came up with quite a few, well, really quite a lot of potential unintended consequences of that. So an example there could be that, you know, maybe a student has concerns or they're alarmed or they don't understand and they reach out to the teacher, but maybe the teacher's inundated with lots of people and so they're not able to get back to the student. So they, maybe they feel neglected and that could create some harm or they're not able to learn. But it also could mean that there could be potential liability issues for the teachers. Or another issue could be that maybe students could enter any personal information about themselves, which could, you know, leave them at risk if the tool could ever get into the wrong hands. Or even just thinking about, like, the context in which a student might be using this. Like, if they're at home, you know, maybe there could be someone else in the home that shouldn't see that material like a younger sibling. So it's kind of just playing through
8:03all of these different scenarios. And then as a result of doing that, the team actually decided not to build that particular feature. And it was quite a sort of quick and efficient way to test that out rather than going ahead and actually building out a prototype and testing it to see what would happen. That's really interesting. Yeah, to your point earlier, I can definitely see there being a lot of benefits to applying that same type of design thinking to, you know, every project that you work on regardless of the industry. I wonder, too, you know, when you're working with non-profits, you know, one of the things that I've experienced in my past life working in the non-profit world is just the lack of resources and the lack of budget. And people don't tend to have a lot of technical expertise. So I'm wondering kind of what that looks like when you go in to, you know, help an organization build an app or build a piece of technology. Like how, because Pivotal Labs is so, you know, one of the huge benefits is that we help enable our clients to carry forward with the work after we leave. And so I just wonder how does Pivotal Act handle that? That's a really good question. So, yeah, we try to kind of lift and shift or adapt our labs method, as you mentioned, and that definitely involves enabling a product team or working very closely with a designer, product manager, and software engineers so that at the end of the project, the Pivotal Labs team can kind of step back and then that product team on the client side can kind of keep going. And what we found when we started with Act is that a lot of nonprofits don't have software engineers or designers or product managers. Some do, but a lot of them do not, I think for the reasons that you mentioned in terms of kind of financial constraints and budgets and things like that. So we are learning how to kind of adapt our program. And so where we are finding those teams, we can kind of lean on the kind of experience that we have with labs,
10:03but where we don't have that, we've really got to kind of expand the way that we work. And so a lot of that involves really taking a view, like a long-term view, thinking about sustainability and impact. Like if we look at this problem and we actually, you know, we deeply research it, we look at the systems involved and we think actually, yeah, some, you know, software here could really make a difference. We have to think about, well, who's going to, who's actually going to maintain that after the end of the engagement. And so we've looked at a few different models around that, where we built something in such a way that we're able to kind of get that first version out the door and then kind of pause and wait and see kind of how it works in the real world. And then it might be the case that the nonprofit could work with another agency or a contractor kind of further down the line. But the hope is that we've kind of built up their skills in some way. So when they are at that stage, they're kind of using some of the techniques that we do in terms of thinking about outcomes rather than outputs. And so are more likely to hopefully get a piece of technology that actually works for them and hopefully is driving impact. But we're definitely still learning on this and we're for sure still iterating on the whole Pivotal Act service itself. How do clients seek you out? I mean, or do you seek out clients? Like what is the, what's the push pull in terms of finding, finding clients to work with? So far, it's really been by word of mouth. We've kind of gone through like contacts that I've had. I used to work in the international development space and Ali, who was working on Pivotal Act as well, she's also done work in the social impact space too. But we also have, you know, so many people within Pivotal Labs who are passionate about this and either they've worked with non-profits in the past or they know of non-profits. And then there's just a real community around it. Like once you start talking to some people within one organization, they know others in another non-profit. And that's really how it's worked so far in terms of how we get
12:04in touch with non-profits or how they get in touch with us. Yeah, and I'm curious too, like it sounds, it seems like a lot of the organizations we're working with are international in scope. I mean, I'm based, obviously, I mean, if my accent doesn't give it away, I'm based in the U.S. But like the, I'm curious what, like what do you run into working in different geographies in terms of, I imagine there are any number of things from like connectivity or environmental issues to regulation and data sovereignty laws and other things. I'm curious what kind of challenges or what kind of hurdles aside from just budget and, you know, the, sometimes the area you're working, you know, the actual problem you're trying to solve. But like just what are the geographical challenges that might pop up? Yeah, that's a good question. So we've done projects all over the place really and either that they've been based in a certain country but maybe we've done research in other places. So the project that we did with the Collaborative Cash Delivery Network, we actually ended up going and doing research in Nairobi. So as I mentioned, that was all around how to help, that was around helping non-profits be able to collaborate better when there's an emergency and they want to distribute cash to people. And so what we did is spend some time with some technical people who actually work in that space. And when we say technical, we mean people that are technical in terms of how to distribute cash and the means and the methods and the practice specifically around that. we don't necessarily mean building software. So there's different languages as well that we learn when working with NGOs too. So we actually went over there to their office in Nairobi and what we wanted to do is really try and kind of understand the process involved, step through the journey of how these organizations do share data and information. And because we really kind of wanted to draw this out and we didn't really know exactly what it was going to be like, where we turned up or where we went, we built out a whole sort of prototype
14:04out of paper and out of little like cardboard and things like that rather than having any kind of like prototype on a screen that, you know, might require a connection or something like that. And that was really great because also there's something quite nice about stepping out of that digital world to be able to kind of physically see objects and speak to them and understand them. And it meant that people that weren't technical on the sort of software or data front that they could actually get involved and explain how they see it, which is maybe something that I think we, some of us or certainly I am kind of missing in the current situation where everything is online and we have amazing tools right now to be able to kind of work collaboratively and remotely. But I certainly do miss being able to kind of be in a room with people with a whiteboard and post-it notes and things like that to be able to kind of step through some of these things. Yeah, that makes sense. Do these engagements, are they always about building an app or are there ever times where you're designing, like where you're doing more of like a service design type of work? Or I imagine it's, you know, there's service design built into anything digital. But I'm just kind of curious, is it always, is the answer always a piece of technology or not necessarily? Yeah, it's not always. It's a piece of technology, which might seem a bit counterintuitive because obviously we are a tech company. But first and foremost, our goal is to support nonprofits in making impact. And so what we do is try to look and see, well, what are all the ways that an organization can do that? And that includes looking at the opportunities like off-the-shelf software, like maybe there are some tools that are out there already that you can use or that you can adapt to be able to, you know, get to the impact that you're looking to make. And if that can, you know, speaking, coming back to the question that you asked earlier about maybe not having like software developers in your team, like that might be a much more sustainable option if you don't have a team like long-term to maintain it.
16:04So we definitely see that as a win. And, you know, it might also be that like a technical solution, even something off-the-shelf, maybe isn't the solution either. Like maybe there is a process business or something that's offline that would be able to actually get to the impact that you want to. So we do, we do like to kind of take that step back and think about how the technology or potential product could fit in within that broader service. Well, that's interesting. And I hadn't really considered that, right? That sometimes, yes, the problem might not be, like you said, you might not need to build something. Excuse me. You just, like there's other software that an organization might not be aware of that would help them solve a problem or, yeah, like even a non-technical solution. It seems like to some degree even with more traditional organizations that would be, you know, these are things worth considering. It seems like at times, like so often that we want to rush to a technical solution when in reality, you know, like it might not be that technical of a problem. Yeah, exactly. I think that feeling of rushing to a technical solution, like, you know, we see that a lot. You know, I've worked in the tech space. I'm sure I've definitely been guilty of that as well. So we're just trying to really slow things down a little bit and take that step back and figure out, like, what do we really need to solve the problem here? And that slowing things down, it can feel a bit uncomfortable sometimes too, especially because the, a lot of the organizations we work with, you know, they're sometimes working in really, you know, difficult environments and they need to be working with the people and getting solutions out as quickly as they can. You know, they could be people that are in need and they really need to serve them quickly. And so when we're sort of saying, well, let's take a step back, let's really look at these, the system here, let's ask these questions, that can feel a little bit uncomfortable and we sometimes get a little bit of resistance there. And I think there's a difficult balance that we need to strike with supporting nonprofits and moving quickly
18:04with the amazing work that they do, but there's also a lot of value in taking a step back and reflecting and thinking about, you know, really what is it that we're trying to do here and is this really the best way to do it? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense and sometimes even just having an outside set of eyes and a new way of looking at a problem can bring to light, you know, solutions that were buried before. I'm kind of curious, Ellie, to hear like some specific, I mean, you mentioned, you mentioned a couple of specific clients, but I wonder, like, was there, has there been an engagement working with a nonprofit or that, I don't know, the outcome or the solution that you came to was really a surprise, was kind of unexpected? That's a good question. I suppose one that was a surprise, like I keep going back to it, the Collaborative Cash Delivery Network, but maybe that's because it was our first project because initially they came to us and were interested in building out a dashboard to allow all the different NGOs to come together and use that to be able to build a collaboration and what we ended up finding at the end of the engagement, which was really focused on research actually, initially, we were like, let's just spend a few weeks really digging into it. We actually found that what they should focus on first is developing some legal data sharing agreements between all the different NGOs and that's because, you know, they were concerned and interested in being able to share data and share information so they could more efficiently and responsibly get money to people who need it, but we realized that these NGOs are not going to be sharing any of this information if they are not protected legally to do so and so that was a bit of a surprise and again, maybe one of these examples where we didn't jump into building some software with them. So they actually then went and did that. They engaged a legal company who I think worked with them pro bono on it to put those data sharing agreements
20:04in place and I believe they already have them now at the country level to be able to work together because it's an international initiative and they've almost now got them working at an international level so if you want to be kind of collaborating with an NGO from another country. So that was definitely a bit of a surprise and legal data sharing agreements is something that's definitely outside kind of my wheelhouse of expertise. Yeah, I think even the GDPR has some carve-outs for certain maybe non-profits or other industries depending on the use case but that's an important thing to consider and I was thinking that's something that happens even in I think even in every organization is like before you write is trying to figure out what are and I think we hear this with clients too in terms of there's compliance there's regulations we have to abide by there's all these reasons that we can't just jump in and do you know whatever seems like the easy thing to do and so yeah that's definitely worth probably worth the consideration especially if you're cash strapped and really you know really worried Yeah there was another great example that we heard from doing that work in Nairobi as well just to your point around GDPR and kind of the importance of like data and governance and security they were telling us these members of these different NGOs who work in this space around some of the the risks that are involved in this and they keep what they call beneficiary data which is information about the people that the NGOs are looking to support and distribute cash to and they were talking about yeah the dangers involved in that because some of these countries that they're working in there are terrorist organizations so they were giving us the case of Somalia you know where there are terrorist organizations like Al-Shabaab and explaining how important it is to keep that information really secure because if an organization like that or any other nefarious actors were to get hold of it then they've got kind of a ready list of information of people who are about to be receiving money so that could definitely be misused
22:04and information that could be highly sought after so you really kind of have to bake in these kind of levels of security and thinking about these things before just jumping in and building something quickly when we talk about building apps or building solutions or building whatever you want to call it what constitutes an app in the non-profit world I have a general sense in most instances I think of an app either a back office system or a mobile app or whatever what does the typical non-profit app do or function are they mostly back office sorts of things I think you probably have the same wide variation in types of app in the non-profit world that you would also do in the private sector as well there's all kinds of different kinds and I guess we use the term B2B or B2C I don't know whether I would call it direct to consumer in the non-profit space because I'm not sure that they're necessarily consumers in this case but yeah it could definitely really range I would say most of the tools that we worked on they're not that the back office kind they've mainly been more of that kind of programmatic approach so the project I'll just give you some examples the project that I mentioned earlier about working with young people who've been in care that was in the UK and that was around building a tool that both young people could use but also their social worker the idea being to put the power back in the hands of the young person so they can understand their own care program in language that makes sense to them rather than a language that's a little bit removed a bit more regulation and policy type thing so I would say that's more of that direct or the equivalent of whatever B2C would be so yeah it's
24:04really been a mix and similarly another project we've worked on is with a non-profit called Carina in Seattle in the US and that's an app to match child care and it matches them up with care providers and so again that's kind of really direct to those users who would need to use the app but there are definitely back office kind of tools and pieces of software that I think could make the lives of non-profits more efficient as well we just haven't actually focused on those so far in Act but I definitely think that that is something that we could explore going forward do you have any projects coming up that you'd like to talk about is there anything you know what's the future of Pivotal Act look like yeah so the future really right now is building the team that's something that we're working on and with that I think that's going to help with kind of expanding our horizons and figuring out what non-profits that we can work with at conversation if there are any non-profits that would want to get in touch or learn more we'd love to talk to them so we're very much kind of in the space of wanting to find organizations we can work with we are there's a couple of people in from Pivotal Labs who are based in our Tokyo office and they're not on a project right now and they're spending a little bit of time researching the Japanese non-profit market which is something I know literally nothing about and so it's going to be really interesting to kind of see what they find and try and understand are there any organizations out there that we could support that would benefit from working with us so we're definitely trying to take more of that global approach and working with the Pivotal Labs offices that we have around the world that's awesome and I saw that you're also speaking at Net Hope Global Summit 2020 I think that's next week yeah yeah really excited to be to be doing
26:04that and that'll be me and Ali as well who is working on Pivotal Act so yeah really looking forward to that to the virtual event yeah really keen to kind of see who comes and answer lots of questions and you I'm curious what kind of lessons you're learning maybe from your non-profit clients that could be applicable to other organizations right whether it's in terms of I don't know doing stuff on a budget or design thinking or any of these things I'm just curious like I assume there are lessons that must kind of flow in both directions here and it's you know that I'd be really interested to get a sense of what those might be oh yeah I'm learning so much there is there is so much that I don't know and just you know I'm learning more and more every day from doing this work I think that there is a lot that we do with act and that we're learning on act that could be applicable mentioned is this idea of kind of taking that ecosystem approach and looking at the unintended consequences we've already talked about that that idea of kind of taking a step back as well I think is also something that's really important something else as well that I've learned is just about being a being a little bit more flexible we have a very opinionated way of building software and pivotal labs which which is great and there's a reason behind that it's you know been going a long time and you know it's really where I kind of learned my product management you know skills and ability it was kind of in that environment where we you know follow this like extreme programming approach we always do pair programming we do test human development like we do
28:04all of these things we work eight hours a day we always break for lunch at the same time which is which is a really good thing when you're working with a team and trying to engender a little bit of cultural change which is what we're trying to do generally with labs it's really about building a team to be able to continue and build the product going forward but I do think that there is an element of flexibility that needs to come and I've really felt this with working with non-profits because they are so busy and time poor and that's not to say that people in enterprise world and private sector aren't but it's something that I've really felt I think working out of hours trying to finish things off and so when we're saying to them we need to work with you full time over the whole length of this project that's what we need that's really hard and even if they agree to that what we found is we get to six o'clock and they're going to do their other work and that doesn't make sense that doesn't work people going to burn out doing that and so we've just had to kind of relax a little bit but kind of try and lean into finding what's that balance between being flexible with that but at the same time spending enough time together where we're able to not do the work on our own but work with the non-profits so they're seeing the practices that we use and it's just a really fine balance I think it's you know we're learning about this as well like we we have this you know nine to six kind of attitude that we work and we kind of believe that sustainable pace is really important but if you're working on an emergency you're not going to be working at a sustainable pace you're probably going to be working all hours to get whatever people need to them unrealistic
30:04and unempathetic and that we you know we're just so far away from an organization that's doing that kind of work so that's definitely been a learning for me to kind of recognize that and I think what I've been trying to do is kind of switch things a little bit to step back and think why are we trying to be a sustainable pace and it's all about like mental health reducing stress and so trying to think of other ways that we can do that with teams and on projects and maybe it's about more about creating that space for feedback and working with teams to really like around things like psychological safety and encouraging people to be able to speak up if they're not feeling okay or encouraging people to take a little break if they need to not suffer in silence people feel like they can give feedback and question things that their superior may have said or their boss may have said and they're not going to be worried about getting in trouble about it that's actually helpful so more of those little things rather than being so dogmatic about our approaches that's just one example there's many things I think that I've been learning along the way and I think we're still trying to figure out that balance but that that's one that just sticks in my mind yeah that makes a lot of sense oh I was just going to say that that makes a lot of sense and it reminds me of a conversation we had last week on the podcast with Paul Sullivan and Joe Moore about working remotely and the flexibility that is really needed when you're working with folks who are all stuck at home and no one is in the office at an enterprise working those typical nine to five or nine to six hours so it sounds like there's a lot of parallels and finding the bits and pieces like what's really going to make a difference in fostering that change
32:04of culture and that sustainability yeah that really makes sense yeah I was thinking too it just reminded me because I had for some reason it hadn't occurred to me because I guess I probably need to get out in the real world I've spent so much time on the computer as a job but it occurs to me we're having worked at non-profits and undergrad then doing whatever from nine to six is unrealistic in a lot of industries and especially non-profits wherever people are out in the field they're out meeting with other groups to get stuff done and then they have to get back and get the work done data entry or whatever stuff they have to do digitally and I think that's a different world I imagine yes to your point there are other industries where that's a thing there are other industries where it would be great probably to get people on some sort of a you know try to get people utilizing some sort of the labs methodologies but for the fact that it's a very different industry than working with software teams so all right well listen Ellie is there anything else now that my tangent is done is there anything else that we haven't touched on no I think we've covered lots I mean it's definitely been a journey and I guess I just want to put it out there that we you know we're still learning and we're still figuring out how to do it like we definitely kind of building in like feedback loops into the process like after projects we're going and interviewing all the pivots all the people from labs that have been on projects and all the clients and we're trying to synthesize everything and kind of figure out you know what's working what's not working and at the same time taking that like longer term view like beyond the end of a project to kind of see you know was the nonprofit able to continue this way of working
34:09really be looking at a longer time frame if we're being serious about talking about impact like that's something that you're not really going to see in like three months or four months that you're working on a project you need to take that longer term view so that's what we're trying to do but very much still adapting and still learning as we go and yeah really excited about what the future will bring in the new projects that we're going to do all right fantastic thank you so much thanks so much