Category

Customer Service
Technology

Submitted By

Bryan Melville, Bryan.Melville@Colorado.edu, Academic Technology Development Product Owner & LMS Program Manager, Office of Information Technology 

Project Team

Jason Black, jason.s.black@colorado.edu, Senior Domain Architect - SSD, Office of Information Technology
Quang Do, quang.do@colorado.edu, Software Engineer / SW Analyst, Office of Information Technology
Bryan Melville, Bryan.Melville@Colorado.edu, Academic Technology Development Product Owner & LMS Program Manager, Office of Information Technology
Anita Antony Samy, anita.antonysamy@colorado.edu, Senior Quality Assurance Engineer, Office of Information Technology
Alicia Torres de Lozano, alicia.torresdelozano@colorado.edu, Senior Project Manager, Office of Information Technology

Project Description

The Leeds School of Business approached the Academic Technology team in OIT requesting our assistance with modernizing their manual, tedious workflow for removing Campus Solutions holds based on student grades in Canvas. Leveraging our unique partnership with the OIT Software Engineering team, we used our expertise in Agile project management to capture business requirements, translate them into user stories and prioritize them against our other work. The delivered process leverages technologies including Spring Boot in Java and Oracle, which automatically pulls data on students with scores above 80% in the Leeds Required Advising Sessions and the Leeds First Year Experience courses and sends that data to Campus Solutions via SFTP to remove the holds. The process also ensures that we don’t send duplicate data. This has led to faster, more accurate hold removal for students as well as streamlining and automating a multi-step manual workflow for Leeds.

Project Efficiency 

Prior to this effort, the Leeds School of Business was tracking and removing these holds by hand, requiring a multi-step, multi-user process that included pulling Qualtrics data multiple times a week, manually lifting 1,000+ holds in CS, record keeping re: which holds have been removed and fielding emails and calls from frustrated students awaiting hold removal. The process delivered by Software Engineering removes the need for all that manual work through automation, saving Leeds an estimated 30 hours of work per semester and shifting hold removal to a process that runs every half-hour, resulting in a better student experience.

Project Inspiration 

Our team is acutely aware of the value that automation can bring to the University, and so when Bree Orozco from the Leeds School of Business reached out to see if we could help modernize her existing manual hold removal process, we were eager to help! Software Engineering has delivered similar functionality for other stakeholders in the past, and through analysis of the business requirements for Leeds we determined that we were able to leverage our past experience & expertise to automate this workflow.

What Makes You Happiest about this Project?

This effort is particularly satisfying because of the immediate and tangible impact that it has had on the stakeholder. By removing the need for manual hold tracking and removal through automation, we are saving the Leeds School of Business nearly 100 hours of work per year, as well as removing the potential for user error and improving the student experience through faster hold removal. This effort also establishes a template for how to leverage automation to resolve similar issues in the future, meaning that it would be much easier for us to assist other stakeholders with similar requests going forward.