Day 4: The first day at AXON ACTIVE VIETNAM

Day 4:
About shadowing, Axon Active Vietnam, different approaches in construction site planning and a true working philosophy 

Today was the first day I actually saw into the company of Axon Active Vietnam. Therefore I will give some background information about the companies structure, its tasks and my shadowing host.

First of all my cousin wrote me today and said that he really enjoyed reading my blog. His next question then was: "And why are you doing this"? So for those not from my class I will provide a quick description of what the so called "Shadowing Experience" is about and what the aims are.

I am studying International Management at the FHNW in Brugg/Windisch. As part of my studies I have to gain some intercultural ECTS points. Those can be earned by different context modules, study trips, or a semester abroad. As I am not able to participate in a semester abroad I had to find other ways to gain my intercultural experience of which one is this Shadowing Experience.

The aim of the Shadowing Experience is to gain an insight into a foreign working culture. This means to visit a company abroad and to act as a "shadow" of a manager and observe the different working culture. I have to write a blog (yes, this one) and in our next semester also a work experience paper which will also focus on intercultural working environments.

Start of the Shadowing Experience: An introduction to the company and my shadowing host.

As mentioned above, the company I visit is called Axon Active Vietnam. It is part of the Axon Group which has its headquarter in Lucerne, Switzerland (http://www.axonactive.ch/en/). Axon Active has many subsidiaries of which I will focus on two of them as they are immediately relevant to my experience here.

Axon Active Vietnam (http://www.axonactive.com/)
is an Offshore Development Center (ODC) and also an Offshore Testing Center (OTC). It has two offices of which one is located in Ho-Chi-Minh City (that's where I am) and another one in Da Nang. In total, the company employs more than 300 developers in Vietnam!
The two branches (Da Nang, and Ho-Chi-Minh City) are organized in departments and from the departments you can already tell that the headquarter of the company is most probably located somewhere in Switzerland.

You can check out the website for more Departments
(source: http://www.axonactive.com/company/#management)

The different departments include different teams with some very cool names such as:

These are just some teams. You can again refer to the website for more information:
(source: http://www.axonactive.com/teams/)

The reception desk at Axon Active Vietnam

The office spaces are located at the 10th floor in a building near the airport (a picture of the building will follow).  I personally have to say that I did not expect such a modern working environment in a Vietnamese company. The desk space per person is rather small but the technical standard is very high (even better than in many companies I have worked in so far in Switzerland). This, however, is of course necessary if you have to be connected to Switzerland for meetings and a meeting room crowded with no less than 27 people participate in a meeting with 6 other people from Switzerland via Skype (I will come back to the actual meeting).

Mr. Daniel Gauch; my shadowing host

Daniel Gauch is my "shadowing host" during my time here. He is the Head of Development at Axon Ivy (http://www.axonivy.com/ch-en/), a subsidiary of the Axon Group.  Axon Ivy provides IT solutions for Intelligent Business Process Management (IBPM), Case Management, Business Intelligence, and Banking Cloud. Daniel told me today that they even earned a place in the Gartner 's Magic Quadrant for intelligent solutions in business process management with their IBPM Suite. As far as I have understood, if you are mentioned by Gartner (http://www.gartner.com/technology/home.jsp) it is as if you were a restaurant and would be awarded a 5 star rating in the Michelin Guide.
So it is for sure a reason to be proud of, especially because the company actually made it within the first try which is not common at all as the criterias to be met are very tough.

I met Daniel at a coffee shop near the office and he arrived together with the CIO of Axon Active Vietnam, Mr.
Sebastian Sussmann. Sebastian also wanted to know what some Swiss student is doing in Vietnam and I explained to him the aim of the shadowing experience. He is actually living in Ho-Chi-Minh City and when I asked him for how long he already lived here he told me that he doesn't really know because the work in Vietnam got more and more and it slightly shifted to the point when he spent more time in Vietnam than in Europe.

source: http://www.axonactive.com/
company/#management

The three of us then had an interesting talk about how fast Vietnam is changing. I-ve already visited Vietnam in 2010 and when I went into the city center this Saturday I was baffled as I didn't really recognize the city I was visiting in 2010. So many new buildings and especially skyscrapers mushroomed out of nowhere. Sebastian then stated that he sometimes goes to Europe for some weeks and when he comes back there are several new buildings. If I compare that to Switzerland (think of the Gubrist tunnel) where they are planning for some years how to proceed and then spend even more years to actually work on the construction site... I am pretty sure when the tunnel in Switzerland will be finished around 2022 (or probably even later), they already have to plan the next expansion because the traffic will have increased exponential by then. We came to the conclusion that probably things in Vietnam are not as properly planned as they should be and things in Switzerland are massively overplanned so that the requirements which were valid during the planning phase will most probably be totally different when the project is finished.

Changing requirements is a perfect transition to my next topic which needs to be covered because it has quite some influence on the working environment:

SCRUM 

I guess most of my classmates from Switzerland are now scratching their head and think "that sounds somehow familiar". That is because we already had a look at this topic with Markus Fischer in BIS II and III. I will not go too much into detail but to understand the working structure at Axon Active Vietnam it is of some importance to at least remind you of the basics of this concept.

source: http://www.axonactive.com/how-we-work/

SCRUM is an agile framework which helps to cope with complex projects and today was actually the first time in my life I saw into a real life SCRUM based project management. It seems to me that with this approach we would have been much more efficient with our own assignement in BIS II and III.

It would be really important to go into the topic in detail and how it is really done at Axon Active Vietnam but I am getting pretty tired and should not drink another coffe right now. Because otherwise I will not sleep at all this night and would probably write some thousands more words about SCRUM. I will therefore postpone this particular topic and will come back to it tomorrow when I will try to present it to you in a short and interesting way. Maybe by then, I already had the chance to observe one of the two planning parts and can also share some real experience. For those of you who want to get into the topic already can also watch this entertaining and explanatory video which can also be found under http://www.axonactive.com/how-we-work/.

The first meeting 

When we arrived, Daniel already needed to participate in a meeting and I was invited to go as well. We were sitting on small wooden chairs and were connected to 6 people from Switzerland via Skype and Team Viewer. As mentioned earlier, the meeting room was crowded with about 27 people (me included). Daniel told me before, that it was a little bit a special situation because there were 4 teams participating in the meeting. When I asked him whether this is usually not the case he told me that

there is no "usual" because this would basically be a direct conflict with the Agile work environment which is the embodiment of flexibility. So, what needs to be done, needs to be done and in this particular case there were 4 teams working on one project (whereas each team usually works on its own and the merger happens at a later stage) and there needed to be done some clarification with the different stakeholders. The meeting took about 90 minutes and I won't go into the details. What I would like to point out, however, is that all the participants were highly focused. Each team was showing directly in the Team Viewer what they had worked on and sometimes the people from Switzerland would ask some questions which could be clarified right away. They also showed the responsive design of the product from a tablet perspective. You should know what this means as we have to create also a website with responsive design this semester:). Daniel, from time to time summarized the points which were still to be done and all members in the meeting nodded their heads. Before the call with Switzerland ended, one of the Vietnamese employees closed the meeting with the suitable statement: "LET'S GO OUT AND ROCK!" , which for me confirms my initial impression that the employees are really dedicated to their work. 

At this point I'd like to show you the philosophy of Axon Active Vietnam: 

 

source: http://www.axonactive.com/

The people left the meeting room very quickly and I am sure that they went back to their desks and rocked!

Some further impressions and a wrapup of my first day "at work"

During the meeting there were some people wearing face masks as the people here usually do on the motorbike. While it makes sense to me to wear such a mask on a motorbike to protect yourself from the dust it seemed a little odd to wear it during a meeting. Daniel, however, told me afterwards that they were not protecting themselves from something but that they were actually not feeling well and protecting the other employees from getting sick as well. After this explanation I have to admit that this would also make sense in Switzerland. People too often go to work when they are not feeling well and then, week after week some other person gets sick and needs to stay home. If this could be avoided so easily it seems to be a very, very valid approach. Therefore, if I will visit a next lecture with a mask, don't give me some puzzled looks but thank me for my thoughtful behavior!:)

In a nutshell, my first day was highly interesting, exhausting, packed with a lot of information and impressions and also included a crash course in Agile and SCRUM development (I will get back to that more in detail).  I look forward to another awesome day tomorrow and will also try to take some more pictures. I guess you can understand that I did not take too many pictures today. Or would you run around with a camera and take a picture of everything while the people are actually focusing on their work on your first day in a new company? Or the other way round... Would you appreciate some guy walking around your desk and taking pictures of you while you are at work? 

But we stayed in the office quite late so I was able to get some impressions after some of the people had already left. 

 

Day 3: About rain, more rain, delicious phở bò and who in Vietnam needs Starbucks?

Day 3:
About rain, more rain, delicious phở bò and who in Vietnam needs Starbucks?

Well, what can I say about today. It was raining like there is no tomorrow. Someone here once told me that they sometimes drive to work by motorbike in the morning, and in the evening when they want to get home... well, they have to swim. I thought he was joking but I know better after today. Even though the statement might have been a little exaggerated, if the rain is as strong as it was today, it won't drain off the streets if it continues for a long time.  For me, however, the rainy weather was a good excuse to really catch up with some studying. Therefore I spent the whole morning after breakfast to get together the discounted cashflow model from corporate finance (thank you Mr. Kustner).

Fried egg with a super tasty baguette
and iced coffee

By the way, breakfast today was a full success as I got my long desired baguette with eggs! As I spent my morning with some cashflow calculations I do not want to bother you with that too much. The people of my class from Switzerland will have to deal with it in the near future anyway.

During a short break I had an interesting conversation where the waiter from the hotel restaurant showed me some pictures of traditional Vietnamese clothes and told me that the next King Kong movie which will be published in 2017 was filmed on some Islands in Vietnam. 

He also told me that last year there was actually snow in Hà Nội (north of Vietnam). 

Furthermore he answered my question from yesterday whether the food from the north is generally less spicy than in the south. Turns out it is not the case as it can get quite cold in the north and the people are then eating even spicier than here in the south.

Phở bò

At lunchtime I decided to get some  Phở bò which is a traditional Vietnamese dish. It is a noodle soup with beef and some bean sprouts and other delicious herbs. The woman also served me some kind of pastry with it. I did not know what exactly to do with it as the soup was very delicious already. So I just bit some off and thought it was a little tasteless. She passed by my table two times and was shaking her head. At the third time I guess she couldn't take it anymore and came to me and broke the pastry into small pieces and put them into my soup and was talking something really fast in Vietnamese. I guess it could have been something like: " I don't know how you can eat that just like this... Isn't it obvious that this stuff needs to go into the soup?". But I'll probably never know. In the end I have to agree that it tasted mutch better within the soup than on its own and was a perfect fit. 

As it was still raining after my lunch I decided to find a nice coffee place where I could also do some studying. In Switzerland it would be obvious that you'd go to Starbucks if you need wifi, a proper table and a nice atmosphere (those of you who know me also know that I don't like Starbucks but I have to admit that there are little options in Switzerland if you want these criterias to be met). Well this is most certainly not the case in Vietnam and I could probably write a whole blog on itself about the Vietnamese coffee culture. I'll give you some facts first before I go into my personal thoughts.  

First of all, Vietnam is the second largest café exporter in the world as you can see in the graph below. 

https://www.statista.com/statistics/268135/ranking-of-coffee-exporting-countries/ 

It's actually pretty surprising that not more Vietnamese coffee is consumed in Switzerland but I assume this could be due to the fact that the coffee is usually consumed cold here. I am very sure, however, that it would not lose any of its deliciousness if it was consumed hot. 

Anyway, the Vietnamese coffee is of an outstanding quality (even though you can actually chose which quality you want to have). Some of the finest qualities sell for as much as USD 500 per kilogram in London and New York.
(http://english.vietnamnet.vn/fms/business/74625/starbucks-revenues-in-vietnam-exceed-target.html).

I guess with these information you get the point. Now, back to my thoughts. Vietnamese coffee is the best I have ever tasted in my life and I have been to quite some places mentioned in the above  graph or have at least had some coffee from those countries. But it is not only the taste of the coffee which makes it so special. It is the whole culture around it. Ho-Chi-Minh City (and also other places throughout Vietnam) are crowded with coffee shops. Within the city you could get a coffee every 50 metres. These places almost always provide a good wifi (which is by the way available almost everywhere for free     even in the smallest soup restaurants where they have only two or three tables), very friendly staff, and a cosy environment which no Starbucks I've ever been was able to provide. If you order a cà phê sữa đá you will get an iced coffee with condensed milk which gives the coffee a very sweet taste. If you are more of a "I don't like sugar" person you can also order it black (have a look at the breakfast picture) or if you ask for, in any other form that Starbucks would also serve you. Furthermore, you will always get served some tea (without sugar) to satisfy your thirst. 

As you might have already guessed I am not a big fan of Starbucks. I was wondering whether Starbucks has really tried to get a foot into the Vietnamese market. And guess what... Of course they did which is not surprising when we take a look at their mission statement: 

"Our mission: to inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time." 

http://www.starbucks.com/about-us/company-information/mission-statement 

I don't want to go into details about Starbucks and the sense of this statement which basically implies that Starbucks is for everyone who can hold a cup, lives in a neigborhood and has a human spirit. And  I am well aware that after this blog I will most probably never get to work for Starbucks. It is not meant as an offense to Mr. Schultz (CEO of Starbucks) whom I actually highly respect for his enterpreneurial spirit.  

Gcoffee in Ho-Chi-Minh City. One out of thousands of charming
coffee shops... and 3 Starbucks in this City

What I really want to say is, that a country with such a rich offering of different coffee qualities (a medium quality coffee costs around CHF 2.-) where you can enjoy your coffee at so many places in a really nice atmosphere does not really need another coffee chain. For me it seems a little bit like an American Fondue chain
( e.g. https://www.meltingpot.com) trying to push into the Swiss market which would of course be kind of cute. But just cute and not really to be taken serious... 

Okay... Now I REALLY stop with the whole coffee situation. Sorry this got out of hand a little bit but at least some of you know very well that coffee is a serious and emotional topic:) 

I'd like to close today's post by saying that if you are a coffee lover and want to taste different coffees around the world, Vietnam should defenitely be on your to-visit list. 

And I am sorry for the different font types and sizes but it turns out that blogspot is not as user friendly as one would expect it to be...

Day 2: About breakfast, an ordinary bus ride to the city center and the real world merger of Amazon and Zalando

Day 2:
About breakfast, an ordinary bus ride to the city center and the real world merger of Amazon and Zalando

I slept almost 10 hours last night and right now it seems that I have already successful fighted the jetlag. My cold is also much better than yesterday which might be due to the spicy dinner and to the warm weather conditions. Let's hope it will stay this way. After a comatose sleep I got up and had some breakfast. Unfortunately the hotel ran out of "real bread" so I had to eat toast which was also fine. But in Vietnam, you can actually get delicious crunchy baked baguettes which was introduced by the French during colonial times. The "banh mi" is a typical French baguette and you can buy it in form of a sandwich or just as a normal bread. I hope I'll get one tomorrow. 

My hotel; or more accurately, the hotel I live in :) 

After that, I decided to study some statistics (no joke) which was tougher than I thought it would be :). Afterwards I went together with Christoph and Nathalie, the two POs (product owners / team managers) I already had lunch with yesterday, into the city center to the Ben Thanh Market. The bus drive was actually not as adventurous as I had expected. Interesting, however, was to see that the bus driver had a plant on the bus dashboard. Unfortunately I didn't get a picture of his plant. I was just wondering whether he always drives the same bus or if he actually moves the plant every day to a different bus and how the whole watering process is done...

Entry to the Ben Thanh market from across the street

The Ben Thanh Market is the central market in Saigon and it is crowded with both, tourists and locals. You can find almost everything there. From shoes, bags, scarfs, trousers, any other clothes to food of all sorts and an incredibly big coffee and tea assortment, as well as household tools and electronics of all sorts. The diversity of products is sheer endless and so is the motivation of the vendors at each booth to convince you that you won't find a better product at any other booth at a better price. I never got so much personalised advertisement as today. I personally was the chosen one to receive a special discount on various products fom various venders all through the market. Indeed, Amazone, Zalando and Co. could learn something from these people when it comes to personalised advertisement, variety of goods and dynamic pricing.

Of course, as a student my attentiveness almost automatically increases if I hear words like "discount" or "special offer" so I was walking through the market, trying not to stop at every booth and get involved with the vendors tempting offers. As it is not my first time in Asia, I already know that one always has to bargain.

Inside the Ben Thanh market

Need some coffee to study?

Need some shoes?

Got some nuts?

How about a new vacuum cleaner?

I guess you get the idea :)

I personally just wanted to buy some scarfs which I finally did after some bargaining. Actually, I was able to bargain the price for 4 silk scarfs from 1.8 mio. VND (Vietnamese Dong) to 800'000 VND . At this point, you should be aware that one (1) CHF is worth about 22'500 VND. I was pretty sure I made a good bargain. When I looked at the vendors smiling face after we closed the deal, I'm quite sure she would have had also agreed that it was a good bargain:) In the end I guess, we both left the market satisfied this day. Nathalie told me afterwards, that I should have showed her my student card to get even more discount which actually would have been an awesome idea. Maybe I get the chance to visit a market again and to get back to this input.

bún chả hà nội

In the evening we had some "Bun cha Ha Noi" which is a dish from the north of Vietnam. It is basically a sweet soup with different meat which is cooked on the bbq and then added to the soup. You can also add the rice noodles and some different herbs as you like. It was very delicious and it is less spicy than the food from southern Vietnam (I am not quite sure if that's generally the case).

I finished another very interesting day with this perfect dinner, nice conversations, some good beer and by writing this blog. Tomorrow I will probably spend quite some time to catch up with some studying and to prepare for the official start of my shadowing experience and a little more serious blog writing.

Beer is always served with ice which
 is very refreshing at the temparatureshere. Be aware that "Tiger" is not
a Vietnamese beer!

Day 1: About ruthless airplane neighbors, an amazing welcome to Ho-Chi-Minh City and a different visit at the hairdresser

Day 1:
About ruthless airplane neighbors, an amazing welcome to Ho-Chi-Minh City and a different visit at the hairdresser

This blog is for everybody who is interested in my experience during my stay in Vietnam and will not solely focus on business aspects but will inform you about my experiences during my time here. I try to not make it too boring for those who read it. 

I left Zurich yesterday (October 27, 2016) around lunchtime and was facing an 11 hour flight to Hong Kong from where I would go on to Ho-Chi-Minh City. I was hoping to get some sleep during the flight as I had a terrible cold when I left Zurich. This plan, however, turned out to be impossible if you have 3 guys in the back who are travelling on holiday and ordered the first beers before the plane even took off. So I was forced to listen to their  conversations which were pretty much intellectually undemanding but it was nevertheless impossible to not listen what these guys thought to know about Asian culture from their previous holidays in Koh Pangan, Bangkok, and some other rather touristy places in Asia. After half an hour of listening to their stereotype views about the Asian culture ("Asians are like..." "In Asia you always have to..." "The beer in Asia is..." and so on...)  I decided to watch some movies. In the end I watched 4 movies and did not get any sleep at all. This is why I am pretty tired right now but entirely up to date about the current cinema program. 

My second flight from Hong Kong to Ho-Chi-Minh City was much better and I could at least close my eyes for some time. At the Airport I was picked up by Christoph who is actually not my shadowing host but is also a manager of a development team at Axon Active Vietnam. It was incredibly nice to leave the airport and breath the hot and different air of Ho-Chi-Minh City. Christoph walked me to my hotel and invited me to have lunch with him, his co-manager and the whole team. It was an amazingly warm welcome from the whole team and we had a very good soup! After lunch they headed back to the office after we had some delicious iced coffee. I will go deeper into the organization of Axon Active and the different people at a later point when my shadowing experience actually starts (which is on Monday). 

My first order of business was clear even before my trip started. Get a haircut! So this is exactly what I did. I searched for a hairdresser and found the "Hairsalon JENNY PHAM". I entered and immediately got placed next to the front door. To actually get to work, however, took the friendly guy quite some time as he first finished his food which didn't bother me at all as I was not in a hurry. I also thought a well fed hairdresser is probably better than a hungry one. While I sat there and browsed throught the latest Vietnamese fashion magazines (which are basically the same as in Switzerland just with more Asian people in it) I observed the housecat of the salon and the fish bowls which were placed at every place.

My hair before the haircut (and please consider, after 15 hours of travelling) and the charming fishbowl:)

It turned out that the waiting time was worth it as I got a pretty neat haircut. I have to admit that I was quite confused when he started off with the electric shaver as this is in Switzerland usually the last step during my haircut visits. But then he took the scissors and in the end I even got my hair washed and I am highly satisfied with the result and would recommend the hairdresser at any time. 

Right now I am sitting in a nice rooftop café, having my third iced coffee today and writing this blog. My top priority for today is not to fall asleep before the evening in order to not give the jetlag any chance!

Another nice experience of today was to cross the street. Sounds like easy as pie but this might just be the case in Switzerland where crosswalks actually mean something to the traffic participants. In Vietnam you'd just start to walk onto the street at a constant pace and never get the idea to stop or start to walk faster as the traffic is navigating around you which would be quite difficult for the people if you suddenly stop or move much faster. In my opinion, the safest way to cross a street or to participate in the traffic respectively, would be to drive a motorbike yourself and just go with the flow.  But for today walking works just fine for me.

So that would be it for now. To conclude my first day I can say that I love this place right from the start. It's busy, it's hot, the people are incredibly friendly and helpful and the streets are filled with motorbikes. What could you want more!?
Hope you enjoyed reading my first experiences right out of Ho-Chi-Minh City, Vietnam!