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.