Each summer, Information Technology Services (ITS) provides opportunities for students to participate in a summer internship program. The program, which runs from the beginning of May through the first week of August, is a way for students to participate and help solve real-world problems facing faculty, staff, and students across the U-M community. LSA Technology Services is committed to promoting and sponsoring this program and has hosted interns each summer for the last four years. In addition, Technology Services’ team members Dave Chmura and Jaron Fox act as members of the internship program planning team. This summer, ten students were recruited to work on LSA Technology Services projects across multiple disciplines including accessibility, project management, platform evaluation, and programming. For one of the LSA Technology Services’ projects, we applied for and recruited four students to help program and develop “LSA Space Ready”–a one-stop-shop to manage daily classroom readiness.
LSA Technology Services performs nightly checks of LSA classroom spaces to ensure readiness for class the next day. A team consisting of eight LSA Technology Services student staff, checks over 300 rooms all over campus, six days a week. In the past, those student staff members needed to complete a Google Form with basic information and submit support (TeamDynamix (TDX)) tickets for other team members to address issues. While they could use their personal smartphones to go through the checklist, the Google Form quickly became difficult to edit, provided no historical information or reports to identify chronic issues, and required our staff to jump in and out of the Google Form to submit TDX requests. Because of these factors, LSA Technology Services initiated a new project to streamline the process in a single application that encompasses a Room Check form and an interface to create TDX tickets. It also integrates with a tool that provides information about individual room equipment, provides a daily dashboard for tracking and monitoring progress, and has multiple reports to identify trends and issues.
Because of the relatively short window that our interns were available and on-site, internal LSA staff worked diligently from January to May to develop user requirements, identify risks, develop wireframes for the look and feel of the application, finalize the structure of the database, and set up development and testing environments. LSA Technology Services project participants included Jean Arnold, Lee Coller, Rita Barvinok, Jessica Kowalewski, and Maria Laitan. With Barvinok leading the team, all of the “pre-flight” tasks for LSA Space Ready were completed before the interns joined our team in May. After one week of review and training our interns, Palina Skakun, Charlie Zhanfeng Zheng, Mohammad Arjamand Ali, and Satyadev Moolagani, were ready to start programming, developing, and testing the application.
The team ramped up quickly across multiple disciplines and technologies including Ruby on Rails for backend programming, Javascript, CSS, and Bootstrap for the frontend, and other tools to evaluate accessibility, task tracking, and ticketing. The team met regularly with the project participants and gave LSA stakeholders a high-level demo of the application within two weeks of being on-site. A follow-up meeting with stakeholders was held in late June to show progress and receive additional input. The final demo of the production ready system was held in late July to great acclaim from the project sponsors. The team completed documentation and a working production ready application that is being utilized today. Barvinok, who managed the day-to-day application development tasks, was amazed at the speed of development, our interns’ willingness to learn and adopt new technologies, and how invested they were in the success of the project.
Project stakeholder Coller said that “the new application pulls up-to-date information from our databases to streamline the process of surveying our spaces, reporting issues, and retrieving critical data points. It’s especially handy for our student employees, who do not have the same institutional knowledge as our engineers and technicians.”
Team member Mohammad Arjamand Ali added that it was “amazing working with the Web and Application Development Services team on LSA SpaceReady. I learned a lot about collaboration & problem-solving, and not to mention, we had an amazing team!"
If you’d like to learn more about this project, please contact Rita Barvinok from LSA Technology Services.
