dtac story

From Myanmar to Michelin, a Sous-Chef’s Incredible Journey

This year, Myo Min Oo became the first sous-chef from Myanmar at the Michelin Guide-listed restaurant Supanniga Myanmar’s migrant laborers often work the toughest, least paid jobs. They can at least take solace in knowing that, back home, the fruit of their hard work sends children to school and keeps aging parents in good health. But when Myo Min Oo left Myanmar, it was as a runaway teen. And his first years in Thailand offered no hint he would ever support his family, let alone become a sous-chef at Supanniga, a Thai restaurant which holds a plate in the Michelin Guide. Myo Min Oo’s family had wanted him to finish high school. But all his friends left for Thailand, and he decided to follow them. “It nearly broke my father’s heart,” he says. “I was still young back then and just wanted to be with my friends. I was also curious about life in Thailand. But my family didn’t want me to go. The day I left, my dad cried.” His family are Tai Yai, the second largest ethnic group in Myanmar, and live near the Mae Sot Border, where they run a small grocery shop and shuttle goods to and…

What if crowdsourcing could make Thai children love school

INSKRU is a platform to empower Thai teachers with better course material—and 2019 is the year it really took off! Chalipa Dulyakorn, a graduate from Chulalongkorn University in industrial design, is passionate about teaching. But she also feels traditional classes fail to grab Thai students’ interest and imagination. In 2017, she started INSKRU, an online platform that equips Thai teachers with more engaging course materials. This year, it made learning more enjoyable for over one million students. “I wanted to do something impactful. Something I could continue doing after I graduated. My goal is to make students happier and more active in class, but it’s a difficult task for teachers. I saw a need for a platform where they can share and further develop ideas,” she explains. INSKRU provides a blogging platform for teachers to share their pedagogical techniques and success stories with others. The online community also inspires them to create fun and engaging learning environments. Ideas can range from teaching English tenses through a lip sync battle to learning about social roles from popular music videos. But Chalipa says the ideas also need to be relevant and practical to follow. “The coolest ideas often belong to teachers from…

The Dream Team Reinventing the Customer Feedback Loop

They joined a hackathon out of curiosity and ended up building a world first that puts customers at the heart of dtac’s network improvements. Thapakorn Dokmai, Wanchan Islargumpot, Akebordin Duangphoommes, Orraphan Saengsawat, Sirin Pakdeesrisakda, and Montree Monkhetkorn are all dtac employees, but they come from completely different backgrounds and divisions, from marketing to software development. What brought them together was a “hackathon,” a three-day workshop to brainstorm ideas, prototype them, and pitch them to a jury—which in this case, included very big names from Thailand’s startup scene. Ten months later, their project, a complete outlier in the global telecoms industry, launched in its trial phase. “When the team first met, we didn’t know exactly how dtac would make the improvements it promised,” says Thapakorn. “But with the launch of the ‘never stop’ tagline, we felt it was a strong show of honesty and commitment. It showed dtac was here to stay and fight back!” With that in mind, Tapakorn and the team set out to tackle their number one concern: how dtac deals with customer complaints about network quality. “We’d hear grumbling from friends and family. But there was no easy way to know exactly where they had encountered a…

An architect’s story of escaping burnout to follow his passion

In 2019, architectural photographer Chaovarith Poonphol took big risks to reach for his dream job. Chaovarith Poonphol was an architect at A49, Thailand’s most renowned architectural firm. He worked there for seven years, starting as an intern before moving up the ranks to senior architect. In parallel, he was becoming an increasingly sought-after architectural photographer. The pressures of both jobs piling up, he suffered a major burnout. This is the story of how he bounced back and landed in the field of his dreams. “For three years I had been thinking about quitting my job to become a photographer. But I wasn’t sure if I could make a living out of it. Eventually, there were more and more people coming to me with photography work, and I started getting calls from people being recommended by my previous clients. It started too look like I could really make this my job, but the pressure of having two jobs started to take its toll,” says Chaovarith. Back then, Chaovarith was a full-time architect on weekdays and a freelance photographer on weekends, shooting the hottest new buildings around the country. As his freelance career took off, his work appeared in several magazines and…

Roles in Agile and its organic career path.

In the previous chapter, we learned the perspective behind the Agile way of work in dtac and how we slowly transformed our organization for Agile. In this chapter, we will focus on responsibilities of each agile role and their career paths. Ranks don’t matter, everyone in a team is equal. Traditional way of work requires far too many ranks, positions and hierarchy, whether it is manager, supervisors or heads of department. On the other hand, Agile aims to do the opposite by reducing those roles to flatten the organizational chart. By doing this, Agile aims to fuel organization to move faster and decease the level of decision. This leads to Agile way of work having only 5 main roles : Product Owner, Scrum Master, Agile Coach, Chapter Lead and Tribe Lead. Nevertheless these five roles are still considered a trivial part to the Agile structure as it mainly focuses on team members and in Agile way, their teams are comprised of experts from various fields come to work together. Chokchai Phataramalai, Agile coach of dtac, claims that in Agile, no one is superior to others in term of roles and positions. Everyone in Agile is responsible for their tasks and…

Agile proves to fasten dtac postpaid-inlife’s workflow and tighten members’ relationship

In this chapter, We have a chance to sit down and talk with a determined Agile team leader, Pattaravadee Leekulpitak, VP Head of Postpaid -inLife Unit, dtac. Khun Ploy explained that her team, “Postpaid-inlife”, has a total of 4 members. She herself has to be in charge of both her full-time job and agile team. Khun ploy and her teammates start their days with Stand-up meeting, a daily 15-minute meeting which allow them to know what task each member is holding. Stand-up meeting let them know which tasks can be finished first and has to be prioritized. “Before Agile, our team members used to work separately so all of us did not understand the whole picture of the project, hence we prioritize tasks unequally. Luckily after agile, everyone in our team gradually generated the unified goal.” Claimed Khun Ploy. Consequently, the amount of time we used to wait for each feedback has been gradually decreased. Way back when, we attended the meeting twice a month but after agile, we work together every day and we get to discuss and develop project together . Easily-speaking, the once complicated processes has been shorten and become more convenient. Pattaravadee Leekulpitak, VP Head of…

Find out how agile powered big breakthroughs for EV and Digital Service team

Since we have learned the fundamental components of agile in the first content, let’s dive in to two agile teams who adopted agile from their very first steps. These two courageous trailblazers are EV (Electric Vehicle) and Digital Service. EV, the new frontier of dtac business Let’s start this chapter with EV, dtac’s mobile network operator. EV is a complete new chapter for dtac and a very challenging mission as it’s the first attempt of dtac , the mobile network operator to become connectivity provider. “We started at the beginning of 2019 when Khun Alex rode a motorcycle on a stage. It was quite a talk of the town. 2 weeks later, we began our mission right away. We put all our effort and finally, our hard work paid off as we could launch EV platform at Thailand Mobile Expo at the beginning of 2019.” Sinunpat Tangchaitrakul, AVP, Partnership Things might seem to start perfectly as they were able to launch it at Thailand Mobile Expo but the motorcycle ‘s market is a complete another world from telecommunication, team members realized they need to acquire more knowledge and experience in order to accomplish their mission. Consequently, they agreed more time…

How agile ways of work could reshape dtac?

Weeks ago, dtac launched 8 agile teams operating under a new way of work. “dtac is a big organization, packed with thousand of employees, numerous divisions and has been working in Silo system for so long. These factors sometimes cause a campaign to run slowly because the decisions have been made by far too many people. This tardiness has a bad effect on customers, causing them to wait longer for their problems to be solved .” said Chokchai Pattaramalai, agile coach of dtac. Nowadays, the rapidly evolving technology cause customers’ behavior to change tremendously. Customers need a range of variety products and crave for the strong solution to their pain point. “Consequently, dtac decided to experiment in various innovated way of work and Agile is among those practices. The most outstanding property of agile is it decrease the unnecessary and complicated processes while encouraging people to make products faster. Agile support people to change and adapt plan to correspond with the current situation.” said Chokchai Pattaramalai, agile coach of dtac. Working like agile. Agile was originated from a software developer some ten years ago. Back then, they faced the difficulty of being too slow at work and facing far too…

Get creative at Samyan Mitrtown’s Triple Y Hotel

The recently opened Samyan Mitrtown operates 24/7 and brings a slightly different focus compared to most malls thanks to more shops and services focused on education, co-working, crafts and fitness. Connected to the MRT by a tunnel that was mobbed by throngs of selfie-takers, Samyan Mitrtown was an instant hit with students and office workers in the nearby Chamchuri Square. What most of the crowds have not yet experienced is Triple Y Hotel & Residence, a mixed-use project on Samyan Mitrtown's 7th- 33rd floor, divided into a hotel (7th-11th floor) and residence (11th-33rd floor). Triple Y Hotel & Residence sticks to to the project's ‘Urban Life Library’ tagline, and the aim of being a ‘forever learning space for every range of ages.’ In support of the changing ways of work at nearby companies such as dtac, these spaces could combine perfectly to host hackathons and workshops over several days. In ad, SAMYAN Mitrtown Hall can host even larger events. In the hotel part, rooms range from 17 square meters for solo travelers to ‘Studio Suite’ which can house up to 6 people. And locals will be particularly interesting in the co-working space. As for the Triple Y Residence, it offers…

Collecting experiences over things

Writer: Rawit Harnusaha Millennials aren’t spending their money on luxury watches or pricey designer bags. And one of the mega-trend is that people are prioritizing their tangible stuff less and less, and assigning greater importance to personal experiences. The move does not mean that they cannot afford those luxury stuff, but they are not what the millennials value, resulting in the big shift in social status. In addition, they do not want to own assets, even home, condominium or car. For transportation, ridesharing service plays more roles in the way people commute thanks to its convenience. At the same time, millennials consider homeownership is a burden, resulting in the growing trend in built-for-rent. In fact, built-for-rent has been on the surge for a very long time. And Thailand is highly likely to follow that trend too. What people are looking for next? Millennials are assigning greater importance to “personal experiences” and this has happened for a period of time. When it comes to decision-making on spending money, they look for experience value instead of just products in return. This can evidently reflect from growth in service business during economic downturn. What experiences Thais look for? There are a myriad number…

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