You manage Bamboo's Vietnam office in Ho Chi Minh City. How many employees are based there? How are your teams organized?
We have a full-time staff of 85 in our office. General Management takes care of finance, administration, regulations and general day-to-day operations. On the technical side, there are 5 groups, each of which is headed up by a team lead: Development, Customization, Support, Test Engineering, and Quality Assurance.
The main function of the Development group is to write code for our Web Parts. The Customization group actually consists of 3 smaller teams: Bamboo Information Systems (BIS), whose main function is to enhance and maintain our websites (Storefront, Bamboo Nation, and our SharePoint Intranet), and the Solutions Design and Solutions Engineering teams, whose main function is to work on custom projects, and to provide support for the U.S.-based Custom Solutions group. Our Support team assists the U.S. team in monitoring and providing user support in the Bamboo Nation forums. The Engineering Test team builds, packages, and reviews each product's structure and configuration, and smoke tests products before shipping to the QA group. The Quality Assurance group, with a staff of over 20, is dedicated to finding and terminating bugs. Additionally, we have an IT assistant whose responsibility it is to take care of networking and infrastructure.
A couple of groups from the Vietnam office joined you for a visit to the U.S. this year for TechEd. What did young Vietnamese software engineers think of their first visit to the U.S.? What did they like? What did they dislike? What did they miss most from home?
Visiting the U.S. represented the achievement of a lifelong dream for them, and to be able to visit the U.S. and expand their technical horizons at the same time made it even better. They were all impressed with the openness and friendliness shown by everyone they met while visiting.
Their only regrets were the limitation of their own English skills, and the lack of personal transportation, which limited their ability to explore interesting sites and attend certain events.
Visiting and training in Bamboo's Reston HQ also meant being away from their close friends in Vietnam, and not having access to authentic Vietnamese cuisines, so those were the things they missed the most.
We recently instituted a 4-month rotation for small teams from your organization to embed in the Reston/US office for training purposes. The first team is about halfway into their rotation now, and it's a pleasure for those of us who are based here to get to know them better. How do you determine who will comprise these embedded teams?
Our aim is to always improve business processes, the skill sets of our staff, and to provide productive training environments in order to best accomplish these goals. We want to have all interested team members attending our rotation program and will stick to our commitment and selection of those core and committed team members.
How does collaboration between the Vietnam office and Bamboo's headquarters in the U.S. work? Does working with a US-based team lead to lots of work at odd hours of the day and night?
We spend a great deal of time building infrastructure and process. For example, we have established a communication server through Microsoft Communicator which enables us to communicate effectively with our counterparts on the U.S.-based engineering team. Our engineering team has used remote source control to establish a single baseline for development and, of course, the SharePoint portal itself is where we communicate regularly via the specific project sites where tasks and discussions are heavily used. As a platform for collaboration, SharePoint itself is probably the single biggest factor in our ability to work remotely without barriers. Our team also has its own sub site in the portal to manage our own day-to-day operations.
With offices in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, the ability to provide coverage 24 hours a day is a great asset to our company. For example, our U.S.-based Customer Support team frequently reports customers' bugs to our team in Vietnam, whose primary responsibility is to duplicate bugs in order to terminate them. Most days, when the Support team begins their day in HQ, they already have confirmation on the bugs that were reported, which allows them to assist our customers more efficiently. The same holds true with the BIS, Marcom, and other support areas.
Many technology companies have realized the benefits of establishing a presence in Vietnam. What are some of the advantages? What are the challenges?
With a highly educated workforce from which to draw, the overall skill set of Vietnamese IT workers is growing exponentially.
The language barrier occasionally presents one challenge. Another challenge is the competitive nature of the market ... as the IT industry in Vietnam continues to grow, the competition for the most highly skilled workers increases. As long as we provide a good working environment where people can achieve advancement through increasing knowledge and responsibilities, we're confident in our ability to attract and retain the best and the brightest.
As a true division within Bamboo, we're able to spend more time on building infrastructure and improving processes. Our key competitive advantages are that we are able to work closely as a single, tightly integrated resource, albeit located on different continents.
[Editor's note: This Q&A is one part of a multi-part series presenting Bamboo's 2008 year in review. It all kicks off with a candid blog from CEO, Mike Tanner, who presents An Optimistic View for 2009 and Beyond, and continues in the form of conversations with the following Bamboo department heads:
Posted
Dec 12 2008, 03:59 PM
by
John Anderson
Filed under: Support, Web Parts, Engineering, Anh Le, Collaboration, Development, Bamboo Engineering, Customization, TechEd, Quality Assurance, Vietnam, Test Engineering, Ho Chi Minh City, 2008 Year in Review
John Anderson joined Bamboo Solutions as Manager of Content & Syndication in May 2008 after a 12-year career at AOL. New to SharePoint at the time of his hiring, John was tasked with creating a new blog for the just-launched Bamboo Nation community in which he would document his daily SharePoint learning process. Thus was born the end user-centric SharePoint Blank, for which John authored 200 posts within a year, and which he continues to write today. John writes SharePoint Blank in addition to his responsibilities as Bamboo Nation's de facto managing editor and, while he has learned much about SharePoint in his first year, he gleefully awaits the release of SharePoint 2010, and the reset button that release will represent for SharePoint Blank.