Pér
Plans¶
A plan is where work Pér proposes becomes work that runs: a titled, ordered list of steps, each step a concrete change to your Amperity tenant, and each one approved by a person before it happens. A plan also carries the reason it exists, what to watch out for, and what it produced.
A plan is durable and resumable — you can leave it, come back tomorrow, and it is still there with its history. It is the place to read everything Pér intends to do before any of it happens.
Plans span two stages of the customer decision loop: Approve, then Act.
What a plan is¶
A plan gathers everything one piece of work needs into a single object. There is no second kind of record to learn and no separate place where the detail lives.
A plan carries:
Steps, in order. Each one is a concrete change to Amperity, stated as the change it is.
The reason the plan exists — the argument for the whole thing, above the steps.
Risk flags. What could go wrong or needs watching once the plan runs, graded High, Medium or Low, with the highest first. Where a risk has a measure worth keeping an eye on, that is listed beside it.
What it created in Amperity, as objects you can open.
A status — In progress, Complete, Failed or Abandoned.
Plans belong to the tenant, not to you. Everyone working in your tenant sees the same list of plans.
That list is the Plans page.
How a plan gets written¶
Plans are written two ways, and both produce the same thing.
You can act on a recommendation, or you can ask for a plan in conversation. Either way the steps are written by Pér’s planning agent, so what you learn from one route applies to the other.
From a recommendation. Acting on a recommendation hands it to the planning agent, which reads it in full and turns it into concrete changes. See Acting on a recommendation.
From a conversation. Ask Pér to set up, build or launch something that takes several changes in Amperity, or that involves a long-running job, and it writes a plan rather than making the changes one at a time. A card appears in the conversation with the plan’s title and how many steps there are to review.
How plans are written:
The smallest correct plan. Pér prefers the fewest steps that do the job, and a one-step plan is a normal outcome. A plan holds at most sixteen steps.
Reads only, to make the writes concrete. While writing a plan, Pér reads what it needs to fill in real identifiers, tables and settings. It changes nothing.
A single send is a campaign; a sequence is a journey. When the work is a one-time send, the plan creates a campaign. When it is more than one send, has a wait between sends, or branches on whether someone opened or clicked, the plan creates a journey instead. A sequence cannot be expressed as a campaign, and Amperity rejects one that tries.
A plan stops short of sending. A campaign it creates is left a draft and a journey it creates is left paused. Scheduling the send is yours.
Pér does not write the content of a send. It builds the audience, the campaign or the journey and the configuration around it; it does not produce the creative.
A missing destination is stated, not invented. If a channel the work needs has no destination set up in Amperity, Pér writes the smaller plan your existing destinations support and says plainly, in that step, what is missing.
Approving the steps¶
A plan moves one step at a time, and each step waits for you.
Nothing in a plan runs simply because the plan exists; it runs because someone approved that step.
The first step waits; the rest unlock in order. A step that cannot run yet says so rather than looking broken.
A step that changes something shows a write confirmation — the same card Pér shows in conversation, with the values that will be sent. See What a write confirmation shows you.
A step that only reads runs itself. It changes nothing, so it needs no approval and offers no rejection; it goes as soon as the step before it finishes. The exception is a step whose job’s results are meant to be read before the plan goes on — that one waits for you. See Steps that take a while.
Some steps cover several changes at once. Where changes only make sense together, they arrive as one step and one approval, and the confirmation lists each of them.
You can also approve the whole plan at once. When you approve and run a whole plan, you approve the plan — not each write inside it one at a time. Pér then re-checks at every step whether it may still go on, stops at any step that needs a person, and records which steps it approved on your behalf. See Approving a whole plan at once.
Important
Approving a plan is not the same as watching each write go by. One approval can set a sequence of Amperity writes running, and a write that has run cannot be undone from Pér. Read a plan’s steps before you approve it.
Steps that take a while¶
Some steps start work in Amperity that takes minutes or hours.
Training a model, running a database, running a workflow may take longer than other operations, so a step can launch a job and the plan waits for it.
The plan waits, then carries on. When the job finishes, the next step unlocks.
A checkpoint can hold the plan. Where the results of a long job need reading before the next step runs, the step after it waits for a person and says what finished and what to review.
Important
A plan is not work that continues overnight on its own. It resumes when someone returns to Pér.
When a step fails¶
Two things can go wrong, and they are handled differently. A plan never leaves you on a step that has simply stopped with no explanation.
Amperity refused the change. Pér reads the refusal, corrects the step, and offers it again as a confirmation for you to approve. It will say what was rejected and that it has been corrected. It tries this at most twice; after that the step stays as it is, with the error, for a person to deal with.
You do not have the access the step needs. This is not corrected and retried, because there is nothing to correct. The step keeps its message and waits for you to get the access and run it.
A job Amperity was running failed. The step shows Amperity’s own message, a link to open that workflow in Amperity, and a line of guidance. A predictive step also lists the usual causes.
Where the job can safely be run again, the step offers to retry it.
Note
Retrying is not offered for every failure. It covers a step whose launched job failed or was abandoned, and only when that job can be identified. A step that made several changes at once is not retried automatically, because re-running it would repeat the changes that already succeeded — fix the cause in Amperity and run the plan on from a fresh step instead.
Changing or abandoning a plan¶
A plan is not fixed once it is written.
Before you start approving steps, you can have Pér change what a step will do, or put the whole plan aside. Both have limits, and the second one has a name that invites exactly the wrong expectation.
Changing the steps. Ask Pér in conversation to change a step that has not run yet — a different audience, another name, a changed offer — or to add a step, drop one, or put them in a different order. A step that has already been approved, has run, or was rejected cannot be changed and nothing can be placed before it, and a changed or added step still waits for your approval rather than running. A plan that is approving its own steps cannot be changed at all; stop the run first. Only plans Pér wrote in conversation can be changed this way — a plan built as a fixed sequence of steps keeps its steps as they are.
Reverting a plan. Reverting rejects every step of a plan that has not started and returns its recommendation to the Portfolio, so that work can be proposed again. It is offered only while nothing has progressed past the first step, and only for a plan written from a recommendation. Starting again creates a new plan.
Important
Reverting is not an undo. It abandons a plan before any of it has run. There is no way to undo a change that has already been made in Amperity — that is why the steps are worth reading before you approve them.
Working with plans¶
To open a plan
Open Plans and choose the plan.
From a conversation, open the plan from the card Pér posted there.
To approve and run one step
Read the step’s confirmation.
Click Run step.
To approve and run a whole plan
Read every step first.
Click Approve & run all at the top of the plan.
The control names the number of steps it covers — Approve & run all 5 steps, say. Beside the first step the same action reads Run all 5 steps, or Run the whole plan when there is no count to show.
To stop a plan that is running itself
Click Stop automatic run.
Work already set running in Amperity continues; nothing further is approved.
To retry a step whose job failed
Read the error on the step, and open the workflow in Amperity if you need the detail.
Fix the cause in Amperity.
Click Retry step.
To change a step before it runs
In conversation, tell Pér which step to change and what it should do instead.
Approve the changed step as you would any other.
To revert a plan that has not started
Click Revert to recommendation.
Confirm.
A step you approved and ran, a plan you reverted and a step you retried each appear in the Activity log.