JARVIS for (not) iron man: how Perf will become an assistant for each Delivery manager

Ingenious inventor Tony Stark became a rock star of the universe and one of the most recognizable heroes, not only because of corporate humor, mind and money. A person with an atomic reactor instead of a heart has one extraordinary advantage - information. Moreover, the personal smart assistant JARVIS not only displays statistics for Starck, but also analyzes what is happening, and also gives advice. Such an intelligent personal assistant for Delivery managers will be the Perf, which they are working on in EPAM. About the new word in Delivery Management, which will soon be heard more often than others, our colleagues Sergey Sakhonenko and Ivan Kashchenko told Atlassian Day in Minsk.

Who is the Delivery Manager and why this genius is needed in the team becomes clear when you look behind the scenes of the project. He knows everything about everyone, and will know even in case of force majeure. There is a bug? No question, our superhero knows how to calculate the risks and where to accelerate. But, of course, he does not keep all the information in his head - dozens of tracking systems help him. Such as, for example, JIRA from Atlassian. But the functionality of this brave army is limited, especially if the decision needs to be made quickly, and tons of information is not accumulated anywhere. There are no such aggregators. More precisely, it did not exist. Before in EPAM made Perf .

Sergey Sakhonenko, Senior Project Manager in EPAM:

“Remember how in the Iron Man movie Tony Stark easily made important decisions based on information provided by his intellectual assistant JARVIS? He prepared the information, focused on Stark on important events, warned about the indicators that went into critical areas. Tony, making a decision, does not think for a second, because the information has been prepared and analyzed in advance. We thought it would be good to have our own Jarvis. ”

Performance board or just Perf in the team for a year. He collects information about 150 projects. And he proved that he was not just an assistant, but a smart assistant. He can do something that no one thought about before Tony Stark. Perf builds analytics and tells the manager what is happening in the project: whether the date is in the schedule, whether technical debt is growing, growth trends of bugs, and in the future what happens if you add another coder to the project or remove two. It automatically makes the manager more efficient and whoever led one team for 30 people before, can lead two of the same or one in 100 without losing quality.


And most importantly, do not need any settings. The fact that you need to get out of JIRA "hands" and analyze "head", Perf has already done. It remains to choose a suitable widget from the KPI catalog (today there are more than 100 of them) and directly from the box to bring to the dashboard that analytics that fits the specifics of a particular project.

However, Perf will not stop there either.

Ivan Kashchenko, Software Engineering Manager in EPAM:

“Everyone knows that a person is inferior to a machine that is capable of performing routine work according to an algorithm (I emphasize that it is a routine!). In turn, the machine, which operates according to the algorithm, is inferior to the one that has an element with neural networks and self-learning. This has already been proven in Go, chess, etc. They joke that we in EPAM want to replace managers with robots. No, we do not want. We treat those who believe that the future is behind a reasonable symbiosis of a person and a machine, a program or a robot that not only can perform routine work, but also has the ability to self-study in order to focus on important things or alert people in time. ”

This will be Perf, the assistant, who today is able to analyze a large amount of data, and tomorrow he will learn how to predict and even suggest the best solution.
And if it seems that Perf is still tomorrow, you should look at it today. The current version is available for download, study and testing inside EPAM. The assistant is open and for our clients, can be deployed within their network infrastructure. Next year it will be included in the package of EPAM products, which will be presented on the market. It is not tied to our ecosystem, and this is not accidental. There is confidence that Perf will increase the expertise of project management not only in EPAM, but will become Jarvis for Supermen from Delivery worldwide.