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EPAM in remote mode: how it works

EPAM turned out to be very prepared for the new conditions, since it was originally created as a company that works remotely and with a geographically distributed team. Now in EPAM about 40 thousand employees who work almost on all continents, in several tens offices.
For me personally, there were no visible changes in the work - I was sitting at the computer in the office, so I sit - only at home and with the cat. But recently there was a webinar where colleagues talked about which tools support team life support and how these tools helped EPAM transfer 95% of employees to a remote location in 3 days. I realized that a real iceberg is hidden behind all this, and I really wanted to share it.
For details and a demo, see the webinar.. I’ll tell you “briefly about the main thing” - what the remote (and not only remote) work in EPAM is based on.



Life before isolation


A year and a half ago, EPAM began to develop a concept called Anywhere , which would allow talented professionals from any country to join EPAM remotely and gain access to long-term projects, educational programs and all the opportunities that the company shares with its employees. Colleagues worked out the nuances of security, obtaining equipment, access to programs, etc.
And even earlier, a system or, rather, a platform - TelescopeAI was born. This is a digital space that combines many subsystems, the main tool that supports the management of distributed teams. She is constantly changing, developing.
So it looks now:

These initiatives helped to quickly transfer everyone to remote work.

Tools & Systems


The TelescopeAI platform accompanies an employee on the entire development path, starting from the moment when the recruiter read his CV.

First contact
Before isolation, colleagues had been conducting interviews with candidates online for a long time - on our Interview Portal platform, as technical interviewers are often in different cities and even countries. In addition to group video calls, here you can perform test tasks - write code, solve problems. In the same system, detailed feedback on the candidate based on the results of the interview is affixed.
How to conduct a technical interview
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Adaptation
In order for a beginner to get acquainted with such a volume of new information about a company as ours and not get lost, it takes a lot of effort and time (oh, these first two weeks!). The Adaptation portal is configured so that the employee independently studies all the adaptive materials about the company, internal systems, corporate rules, immerses himself in the corporate culture. At the same time, the employee has a resource manager, to whom he can turn for help at any time and who monitors the progress of the adaptation training.
We periodically return to this portal when it becomes necessary to undergo annual training on labor protection, information security, corporate ethics or other regular trainings.

Development
Bad is the June who does not dream of becoming a lord (or lead, architect, etc.). Three tools will help the employee plan his career and professional development - Feedback, Grow and Assessment.
Feedback service is needed to collect feedback - everyone can give feedback to any employee of the company on their own initiative or on request (feedbacks are needed for assessment). But there is also a mandatory session - every six months we have a campaign to collect feedback. Last year, I first tested it on myself. The lesson is not the easiest, in addition to the feedback about the team you need to write a review about yourself. Extremely useful thing - I recommend practicing once every six months or a year.
How to give feedback
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On the Grow portal, you can see the possible development paths in the company, set goals for yourself, and the system will tell you which set of skills and knowledge is needed, what skills you need to pump, what experience you need to get in order to achieve improvement. In addition to the list of skills and knowledge, the system provides links to educational materials, recommended literature, and trainings. By the way, the portal is open to external users - you can see how it works.
How to set goals to achieve them
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After going through all the stages, you can sign up for Assessment , where a commission of experts will check the level and give a conclusion whether the specialist is ready to move to a new level or not.

Training
We have several services that help in training - Courses, Learn. The Video . EPAM produces and buys a huge number of trainings in different languages, in different disciplines - from engineering to scientific and soft-skills. All are hosted on Learn. At Courses, you can sign up for face-to-face trainings that have now moved online - to Zoom or GoTo Meeting Training. Trainings, meetings, demonstrations - everything is recorded and published on the video portal - our corporate YouTube.

Recently, the Learning & Development team made some courses available to external users in the beta version of the Learn portal .

By the way, the EPAM training center also went online. Today, 700+ students study with us throughout Russia and 270+ trainers and mentors work with them.

For managers,
we already somehow toldwho are resource managers and what are their functions. So, to make it easier for the manager to cope with this additional load, Talks was developed for them and HR managers. Here HR or a resource manager brings in tête-à-tête details of conversations, notes all sorts of subtle points whether it’s a bad mood, any signs of burnout or problems in a team, on a project and more, to keep under control and come to the aid at the right time.

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Project Management
We use the Time system to track working time . Only its essence is not to fix what time a person came and went, how much he spent on a smoke break. No matter how many people were sitting on the chair, it is important how many hours he spent on this or that task. This, first of all, helps to consciously look at a person’s most valuable resource - time, and to learn how to better evaluate which tasks are more complicated and require more time.
Two other systems help to obtain qualitative and quantitative indicators of the project. So, in Health, project managers enter information on the status of the project, note what problems arise, and quantitative indicators of “health” are recorded in Performance. It is connected to Jira, Confluence, CI / CD, Git. Performance has a library of over 150 custom metrics.

EPAM Customer Relations Director Sergei Davydov on Analytics at TelescopeAI:
Our TelescopeAI platform has a rich set of “smart” analytics. For example, in my department, I see the situation regarding the current and future loading of my team, that is, in real time I monitor the risk of underloading or overloading employees and have the ability to respond quickly to this.
There are many more important “smart” analytical indicators that help to manage the team, motivate it and select the most comfortable working conditions that allow employees to reach their potential.
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By the way, “smart” analytics can’t do that either. For example, the system shows the most suitable positions for the employee’s skills on other projects, where he can try to move.

Infrastructure


In conditions of remote work (and not only remote), the organization of self service is important, that is, everything that an employee can do himself, he must do himself. According to this principle, we have Help Desk. It is an automated system with a whole range of services: here you can order a certificate from work, and request access, equipment. Thanks to contact center automation through RPA (Robotic process automation), 20% of incoming requests are processed and routed without human intervention.
To deploy servers for projects, the company has an EPAM Cloud service - a single entry point to various cloud services, whether it be Amazon, Azure, Google, internal servers. An employee just needs to go to the console, specify the parameters of the server that he needs, and after confirming the application by the manager, who immediately sees the cost of such a server, the infrastructure literally rises within a few minutes. Moreover, it can be not just some bare server, it can be a ready-made platform - a monitoring server, a database or a server with a configured CI / CD Pipeline.
Thus, when we switched to the new regime, essentially nothing changed in our work on projects. And if for some customers at the time of the transition the infrastructure was not ready for the remote mode, we quickly deployed the necessary capacities with the development and testing environments at home and provided customers with access so that the joint work on the project would not stop.

Conclusion


This is what digitalization looks like in EPAM. Of course, the company did not come to such a form of existence in two months of being removed, it was all created over the years. But despite the technical equipment and remote work experience, even for EPAM the current situation is a huge challenge and at the same time new opportunities for the development of this digital space.

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