If the Financial Aid Department is the heart of the college institution, then the Skagit Valley College was suffering from a stroke. The heart was clogged up from the result of years of managing paperwork using tried and true ancient techniques: the in person delivery of hand filed paper forms.
And then corona virus came to deliver the death blow. Due to the pandemic, the college campus was forced to close. Unable to allow students to come to campus and process in person financial aid meant that our college might suffer the same fate as several other Washington State institutions and be shut down completely.
They came to me with this problem desperate for a solution. They needed a document repository that could be integrated with our current Legacy student management system data, but that will also be able to transition with our data over the next few years as the school complete its moves to a new student data management system. They needed a way to assign the forms to the students, and a portal where students could securely upload their documents.
The college had a legacy document storage system in place, aging and in need of replacement. The system had fallen out of development and was no longer being supported. The decision was to either purchase an expensive out of the box system, or develop one in-house. Due to the success of previous projects, the President of SVC decided to have me develop a custom in-house document storage and management solution that would be easily integrated into our student data management system.
During the planning phase, the project management documents were drawn up, key deliverables determined, and the use case scenarios developed.
Throughout the software development life cycle, those documents were referred to in order to prevent feature / scope creep from setting back the projected completion date. Using Agile project management I completed several sprints of user story backlogs, and the scrum retrospectives revealed valuable lessons learned about the techniques used to program the application.
In the midst of the pandemic, forced into working remotely, I was under the pressure to save the college by finishing my application well ahead of the projected schedule.
The project close was met with very satisfied stake holders, and the project sponsor was happy to sign off the completed product.
I’d like to say how helpful the system is for managing the documents. Not only is it easy for students to send us the paperwork, I can easily track the status through the lifetime of students financial aid servicing.
Hello Mr. Denney,
Students used to have to take a number and wait in long lines to submit their Financial Aid Paperwork. Now, thanks to your system we can have them submit a digital form directly to us. The staff and students are sooo happy with this change!
Thank you,
Crystal Allison, Director of Financial Aid