ETAbot: project management made simple

Project management is never an easy job. It’s more than task management and scheduling. Being a good PM requires not only excellent communication and technical skills, but also the ability to plan, oversee, and keep track of the big picture. It generally takes time and experience to see what needs to be done, make plans for it, and effectively communicate with stakeholders.

As a software engineer, then later on project lead and release manager at a startup, I’ve encountered lots of challenges managing projects, e.g. late/redundant projects, overbooked resources, miscommunication of expectations. While I was devoting most of my time to project management, I met Alex (CEO of etabot.ai) at the Silicon Valley Open Doors conference where he pitched me his vision for ETAbot: an AI-powered platform for project management.

His idea was to use AI to help individual contributors, managers, and teams stay one step ahead by accurately predicting and seamlessly communicating the future state of projects. The concept immediately drew my attention because I realized this was exactly the tool that I need for my work. Having machines help with project management is of huge value so that you get to spend more time doing true creative work rather than administrative tasks. I decided to join Alex and build a tool to boost team velocity and ensure projects meet their deadline.

What does an AI-powered project management platform mean? ETAbot assists with the estimated time of completion for tasks/projects. It collects historical data from task management systems (e.g. JIRA) and work tools (e.g. G-suite), and develops and trains models to predict and recommend how people work to help them succeed in their projects. For example, it can predict in realtime the estimated date of the completion of each task in the face of changing priorities.

Predicting task completion is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many more things that ETAbot will do: learning and understanding projects and how people work, automatically prioritizing/scheduling tasks, and using Natural Language Processing to automatically scope the size of tasks. Ultimately, ETAbot’s mission is to minimize human effort in project management by assisting, predicting, recommending, and eventually automating tasks.

Projection management made simple starts with ETAbot.