What if tomorrow’s IT leaders had a chance to make an impact on services today by analyzing a business process and making it 95-100 percent faster through automation? Thanks to a capstone project in Professor David Sweeney’s technology management class, that will soon be a reality at Texas A&M.

A team of students was tasked with improving the “time to research” metric used for the Secure Technologies for Aggie Researchers (STAR) platform. The metric measures how quickly a project’s principal investigator (PI) can be onboarded to the secure cloud platform and begin work.

Pictured left to right are: Dr. David Sweeney, Jaityn Jackson, Dr. Joshua Kissee, Joshua Wood, Zachary Keck, Andy Ngo, Noah Woinicki and Ben Bradshaw.

Currently, researchers meet with IT representatives to evaluate their needs and map out one or more solutions. This process takes approximately nine business days. By reducing manual interactions and automating more of the process as recommended by the capstone team, STAR staff hopes to reduce the time to five business days and possibly provide a fast-track option that drops the time to research to four hours. Researchers who meet specific criteria could even begin work immediately.

“The team developed and advocated for a logic tree-based model that outlined the overall workflow,” said Josh Kissee, Ph.D., director of Texas A&M Health IT Services and executive sponsor of the project. “This information was reviewed by Health IT system administrators and our Health IT architect. It was later reviewed by our vendor partner, CloudBolt, which is working with us to advance automation for cloud resources. Not only do we intend to adopt the (team’s) model, it is serving as the first blueprint of how the workflow will execute.”

The student team used the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL ®) version 4 framework, which aligns IT services with business needs. Sweeney, whose class centers around the framework, said such capstone projects often help customers and students see things in new ways. 

“This was an outstanding project that provided value to the customer,” Sweeney said. “The team was quite good at identifying some areas of the process that could be optimized and automated. The advantage of a student team is they don’t have the same view of the situation as the team on the ground.”

Josh Wood, project manager of the team, said members were surprised by the overall scope of STAR and how it ties many services together into one seamless process.

“This was a great opportunity for me both as a student and a professional,” he said. “It was definitely something I would consider a real value-add from an educational standpoint and will benefit the entire team throughout their careers.” 

Kissee, who also sponsored a capstone project in 2019 to evaluate software for IT Governance, pointed out that the team treated the project with the same level of care he would expect of a paid, private consultant.

“The students on this project have such bright careers ahead,” Kissee stressed. “ When I met with the students for the first time, they came prepared with a business case template, asked me hard questions, and got right down to the root of the problem. They came in with such professionalism and tenacity, I knew right away that these Ags were going to succeed on this project — and succeed in their careers and in life.”