Axon Active delivered Agile training and year-long coaching for development teams at ACB, one of Vietnam’s largest private commercial banks. Beyond the initial workshop and Scrum training, recurring team coaching helped embed Agile practices into real delivery within a regulated banking environment.
ACB (Asia Commercial Joint Stock Bank) is one of Vietnam’s leading joint-stock commercial banks, headquartered in Ho Chi Minh City. Banking is a regulated, risk-sensitive environment where new ways of working must align with compliance, governance, and operational reliability. In this context, training alone may not be sufficient to embed lasting change, which is why the engagement combined training with sustained coaching.
The training gave ACB’s people a common language and a working grasp of Scrum; the coaching is what made it stick. Across the year, the two teams were coached through the realities of running Scrum in a bank — sprint discipline, ceremonies that earn their place, and the engineering and delivery habits that hold up under banking’s compliance and risk expectations. By volume, the engagement was overwhelmingly weighted toward this hands-on coaching rather than classroom time, which is what turns a framework people know into a way of working they actually use.
Because a two-day class can teach Scrum, but it can’t change how teams behave under real deadlines. The numbers tell the story: alongside roughly 24 hours of workshops and training, the engagement put in around 180 hours of team coaching across 45 sessions. That ratio — far more coaching than classroom — is what embeds new habits instead of just introducing them.
Carefully, and with respect for the constraints. Rather than dropping in a generic playbook, the coaching worked with the teams’ real delivery and the bank’s governance realities, so agile ways of working reinforced quality and reliability instead of fighting them.
The engagement ran for roughly a year (July 2019 to July 2020) and moved deliberately from classroom to practice:
Coaching began in November 2019, and — like most things that year — was stretched and rescheduled by the pandemic, which the teams and coaches navigated to keep the momentum going.
Huy Nguyen is Education Manager at Axon Active and a Ho Chi Minh City–based agile trainer and coach. He worked as a developer, database analyst, team leader, and project manager before moving into education, and brings 7+ years of teaching experience — including for the Houston Community College System — to his training. At Axon Active he has served as Scrum Master across many teams and helped developers and students adopt Scrum and agile thinking. He holds an MSc in Information Systems. The ACB engagement was delivered by Huy with a co-trainer.
Credentials: Certified Scrum Professional – ScrumMaster (CSP-SM) · Certified Scrum Professional – Product Owner (CSP-PO) · CSM · CSPO · Agile Coaching Skills
Across a workshop (15), a Scrum training class (25), and team coaching (2 teams)
Training and coaching in total
Hands-on team coaching — the bulk of the engagement
(July 2019 – July 2020); coaching from November 2019
a one-day hands-on start for 15 people
a two-day foundation for ~25
two delivery teams readied for Scrum
45 sessions embedding the practice with the teams
Development teams at ACB — around 55 people across a workshop, a Scrum training class, and ongoing coaching for two delivery teams.
The weight of the engagement was sustained coaching — roughly 180 hours across 45 sessions — not classroom time.
About a year (July 2019 to July 2020), with coaching from November 2019; the pandemic stretched the coaching schedule.
Huy Nguyen, Education Manager and agile trainer/coach at Axon Active, with a co-trainer.
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