＞ Why are you being downvoted? Hahha you provided an adjacent point and that’s it. Nothing defamatory or rude 🙈

I’ve done it again...
I really need to take my English studies more seriously.
Translation tools aren’t always reliable either...

>How was your experience with communication? What worked well and didn’t?

Yes, there are some things that are going well.

We primarily communicate in three ways.

The first is text-based communication using Slack, with hundreds of exchanges per day.

We constantly exchange messages like, "What's the progress on the work?", "Were there any problems?", and "I need this done, is that okay?".

We especially check the work progress daily to clarify what they're doing, and we point out any problems if there are any.

The second is online meetings using Google Meet.

We often use it when things can't be conveyed well through Slack or when it's better to talk directly.

Mainly, the Vietnamese BrSE participates in our meetings to understand the meeting content. Then, the BrSE translates it to the implementation team.

Ideally, we would also understand Vietnamese, but so far, we haven't had any issues with the Vietnamese BrSE's translation, so we've concluded that we don't need to understand Vietnamese ourselves.

The third is document-based communication. Essentially, this is communication through requirements specifications, design specifications, and QA sheets.

Communication using QA sheets is particularly active, with 100 to 200 QA questions generated for each requested project.

While it might seem like too many, they provide feedback on feasibility and suggest alternative designs, making it an essential part of the project.

Our success stems from our daily efforts to communicate in various ways, minimizing misunderstandings and ensuring timely progress updates.

Also, a major factor is that we save Slack conversations so we can hold the Vietnamese team accountable if they provide false reports.

Furthermore, when the Vietnamese team is working—for example, when they're modifying the STG environment server—we check their work logs to ensure they're working correctly, so any slacking is immediately detected.

The two areas where things aren't going well are:

1. The language barrier remains.

We lack the skills to fully understand Vietnamese.

There have been times when what we communicated between the Vietnamese team and us was completely misinterpreted. Despite exchanging messages on Slack over 50 times and even creating a Q&A sheet, this still hasn't worked.

Regarding this, during the ITb period, the Japanese side will handle it so that any misunderstandings can be recovered.

1. We haven't shared information about the human resource management situation on the Vietnamese side.

We haven't shared information with the Vietnamese side about the extent of their human resources and how much work they can be assigned.

As a result, the Vietnamese side sometimes has too much free time, or conversely, too much work, and we haven't been able to properly distribute the workload.

This is a serious problem and hasn't been resolved yet.

Their labor contract is also hourly, you see.

We want the Vietnamese side to be as productive as possible, but it's difficult to assign them the right amount of work.

Once, we left the Vietnamese side idle for about a week without assigning them any tasks.

This might be slightly different from communication, but from my perspective, the reason we're doing well with the Vietnamese side is that our executives regularly visit Vietnam to review contracts and communicate with them.

Conversely, there are also cases where the Vietnamese side works at our workplace.

That's how we try to build trust by treating our contractors like our own employees.