On Wed. August 7 2019, the 5th VSHN DAY took place, where our team meets annually for a voluntary off-site strategy day to discuss the future of VSHN.

VSHN Day 2019 Intro: Back to the Future

VSHN co-founder Tobias Brunner (@tobruzh) ignited VSHN Day 2019 with a review. What was the idea behind VSHN? Why did the first VSHNeers join forces in 2014 and founded VSHN AG?

Especially for the younger VSHNeers, who haven’t been with VSHN for a long time, Tobias’ review was very valuable to better understand what VSHN actually stands for and what the idea was behind it and to question the “proven and traditional” hosting, server and cloud business and to turn the market upside down. The technical and organizational challenges that have emerged over the years and during VSHN’s growth were also addressed.

Then we continued with a look into the future: How would we build VSHN and our services today if we could start from “0” again? As you can imagine, this was followed by a passionate discussion. In any case, it quickly became clear that the topic was a matter of heart for all VSHNeers.

From Tobias’ presentation and outlook we will derive some measures on how we can improve VSHN and the services for our customers and partners in the future and how we can make VSHN fit for the next 5 years. Revolution instead of evolution is the motto!

Anyway, you can be very excited about how VSHN will develop in the future.

As always we will keep you up to date and look forward to your feedback!

Workshop with Alex Lichtenberger

After work methodology on VSHN Day 2018, this year’s program focused on the future of VSHN, the division into squads (teams) and open spaces on various topics such as workload & stress, responsibilities and vision. Alex Lichtenberger (impactmatters.ch) moderated us professionally through the day. Many thanks to you, Alex!

In the section “Future of Squads” (Squad = a team of up to 10 VSHNeers for a certain area) we discussed the following questions:

• What are the challenges we have with the current squad setup?
• How can we improve the existing setup and prevent silos?
• How can we improve the “permeability” between squads and promote know-how transfer?

At the end a group exercise followed including a discussion of the results and definition of the next steps.

After that Alex led us through a surprise game: We had to build a spaghetti tower with marshmallows and tape in groups. The aim was to create an elaborate planning as well as to simply try out and, of course, work as a team.

After a fine lunch, our VSHNeer and CEO Patrick presented the financial results of the past business year so that everyone could see how VSHN stands and whether it is actually worth getting up every morning (the short answer is: yes, it is worth it).

Then we went on to open spaces on various topics that we had previously selected.

• What quality requirements do we set ourselves and expect for our customers?
• VSHN Mission, Vision & Values: What does VSHN stand for?
• Decision making & processes, responsibilities
• Stress management and task distribution
• VSHN Recruiting & Onboarding process
• etc.

At the end, the results of the open spaces were presented, discussed together in the team and the next steps were defined.