The wait is over. We’d like to thank the incredible entrants that made this decision so hard, but we are finally at consensus: The inaugural Pashko Award winner for 2023 is:
AR/VR & Immersive Experience Competency Centre
Nataliia’s journey in the virtual universe started with her playing games on her Oculus, asking herself how she could translate her skills into designing for this unique medium. After scouring EPAM to find an Obi-Wan to her Luke, she discovered that while there were 3D designers, Unity/Unreal developers and a handful of game designers, there were no active UX/UI designers working in VR at that time.
Gathering together other like-minded designers and VR enthusiasts, Nataliia drove the learning efforts around core topics such as:
Designing UI for AR/VR; Understanding its restrictions; Spatial thinking, Storyboarding; Sketching; Unity Prototyping; Establishing XR frameworks and many more...
The word soon started to spread on what they were doing. What started off with learning together, developing simple proofs of concept all of a sudden became a rush of demands from VPs, Sales and Delivery Managers to address pre-sales asks on the topic and produce sector specific POCs so EPAM could capitalise on a rapidly growing market demand. This led to the creation of the AR/VR Community and Competency Centre in EPAM, which Nataliia continues to drive and develop to this day.
Nataliia’s entry embodies the frontier spirit that so encompassed Ivan and his legacy. Taking the time to explore an area well ahead of others, to own and communicate back what she was exploring was one of her biggest successes here.
Being curious about what’s new matters - Nataliia not only engaged with that curiosity but translated that back into value for both herself, others and the business at large - this project demonstrated it hugely. It’s one thing to be interested in a new area, but another thing to follow it through, involve others and make things happen.
Nataliia had a strong impact in developing EPAM’s competency in this area and created a wider school and community to engage with it and get involved. Passion begets passion and her passion opened up further growth and scalable opportunities for our business, our clients and our people.
This was never an official project - as much as it was Nataliia’s choice to pursue the learning on VR, it was also her choice to embrace the challenge to scale it when given the chance to - This initiative could've stopped at any point but she chose to continue, drive it and grow it. This for us resonates so much with Ivan’s spirit and that’s why we found Nataliia the worthy winner of the inaugural Pashko Award.
Chat to Nataliia:
nataliia_savchenko@epam.com
See what Nataliia’s doing:
AR/VR PitchDeckJoin the community
VR/AR School
The following were the close in contention entries that really impressed the panel
Daria Kriuchkova
Bespoke Knowledge Management Model
After joining a payroll project, aimed at automating and leading the research process, with the capability to combine quantitative and qualitative data into one multi-level interactive report, Daria applied her insights as a financial analyst in her pre-EPAM life to completely reconfigure how knowledge management systems using the Coda tool could deliver ongoing value and speed to research and development teams. This led to her developing her own bespoke KM model, which she continues to develop today.
Kirk Tierney
Reusable Service Design Strategy Templates, BT
Kirk used an engagement with BT to push both himself and his client into an unfamiliar area for him, Service Design. Deep-diving into unknown territory and harnessing the expertise of internal EPAM mentors, he was able to create an extensive suite of service design templates, approaches and tools to not only expand the engagement into a wider opportunity for EPAM in BT, but also establish a wide range of reusable assets and insights for others to avail of in projects to come.
Stay tuned for updates on Pashko 2024 and get in touch if you want to get involved with the award.
