A custom solution to FedEx Ground's change management process won top honors for seven students from Penn State Beaver in the School of Information Sciences and Technology's first university-wide competition for IST seniors held Saturday, April 19. Four teams of IST students, representing four campuses, outlined the IT problems they had worked on throughout the spring semester as part of IST 440W, IST Integration and Problem Solving. Each campus had a different project, but all projects came from businesses and organizations located near the campuses.
A panel of judges scored the students on their technical solutions, quality of their written materials, project management documents and 30-minute presentations given at University Park on April 19.
The winners will divide $2,500, donated by Penn State alumnus Jeff Crown (Class of '81), partner in Boston-based Aqueduct Partners, a consulting company providing revenue acceleration, merger and acquisition services.
"This inaugural statewide competition showed the breadth of problems that an IST student can attack and solve," said Dr. Joseph Lambert, IST senior associate dean and organizer of the competition. "It is clear that each of the campuses represented is preparing leaders of the digital, global economy."
Also represented were Penn State Lehigh Valley, University Park and Penn State Worthington Scranton.
The Beaver campus students are Chris Allias, Lauren Blackburn, Brian Campbell, Stephen Miller, Jim River, David Walker and Kim Wilson, who formed "Miller and Associates, a change management specialty consulting group."
IST 440W is designed as a project-based course utilizing an actual customer problem. Besides providing a technical solution, students are expected to establish relationships with their customers, so communication skills are emphasized.
A capstone course, IST 440W demands that students apply the concepts and skills learned in their previous IST classes.
The problem for the Beaver campus students was how to integrate FedEx Ground's four unrelated products used to control modifications made by hundreds of programmers. Miller and Associates developed a unified solution that would document changes, institute an electronic approval process and improve security.
Representing University Park were Natalie Pappas, Chris Lewczyk, Alex Ross, Patrick Thornton and Bryan Vitale. Their project involved the creation of an online repository for Lockheed Martin intellectual property that would enable the company to better utilize patented discoveries and business processes.
Eleven IST students from Penn State Worthington-Scranton analyzed Penn State's Lackawanna County Extension Office with an eye to creating an infrastructure to improve workflow and office processes that could be utilized in all of the state's extension services. Those students were Chris Kuruts, Erik Swanson, Frank Pacelli, Jody Mayer, Kevin Hall, Filip Musat, Mike Gulbin, Charlie Lang, Jason Setzer, Ron Ciarrocchi and Matt Zenker.
And Penn State Lehigh Valley's team looked at how Penske could improve its online truck rental and leasing by examining competitors' Web sites and rental processes. On that team were Terri Brand, Jim Preslar and Timothy Eisenhauer.
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