Kent State University Wins the Battle Against Backlog

Challenge

The B-word

At KSU, students are a top priority. That means ensuring they have the education, experiences, and support they need to graduate and live successfully, satisfying lives in their work, and commitment to becoming engaged citizens. With multiple departments and priorities complicating the IT queue, KSU’s IT team had their work cut out for them, trying to meet the diverse demands of students and staff across the university.

“What drove us to low-code was the B-word: backlog,” Mike Papania, IT Director at KSU, explained. “We were happy with our current environment, but it just took too long.”

And a long time it did. After months of development, the team had to send their apps to the Database Administrator for deployment. When it was finally launch time, they had a tight window to avoid business disruption. However, because the production and development servers were different, they often encountered errors, forcing them to postpone the launch even more.

Solution

A digital university for students and staff

KSU became an OutSystems customer in 2015.

In the first seven years of its low-code journey, the IT team — 8 full-time developers, one UI specialist, one QA Analyst, and two Platform Administrators — has delivered around 50 customer-facing applications used by students, staff, academics, and university administrators, and hundreds of internal helper apps and reusable components.

“A big part of our Digital Factory approach has been finding ways to reuse components and code across multiple apps,” Sameer Jaleel, Associate Chief Information Officer, explains. “A great example is our authentication. As users have the same credentials across all university applications, we can reuse the base code here and modify it to suit the needs of each app.”

KSU’s extensive use of OutSystems means the platform has touched nearly every part of the university. A few examples include:

• Manage My Program (MMP): Students can use MMP to self-manage their courses and change their majors, minors, and concentrations. The app, which digitized a heavily paper-based process, manages 9,000+ change requests yearly.
• KSU Mobile App: This mobile app was designed for all 33,000 students and faculty staff to manage their lives at KSU. Students can consult their GPA, class schedule, directions to class, live bus routes, meal plan, and student account balance, for example. Faculty members can submit leave requests and consult pay stubs, among other employee-related features.
• Tech Tools: The go-to tool for help desk employees. The app consolidated multiple systems into just one screen, allowing help desk employees to perform their jobs more efficiently. They can do things like reset passwords, verify a person using SMS, deactivate or activate user accounts, synchronize passwords across systems, view inventory (PCs) issued and used by employees, and view course assignments in the campus Learning Management System (LMS).

Results

KSU 1. Backlog 0.

One of the main reasons that led KSU to OutSystems was the development speed, but the platform turned out to be much more than that.

The team can now deliver more user-friendly apps that drive a superior student experience. In user surveys for the KSUMobile app, 84% said the app was easy or very easy to use, and 80% said they found information easy or very easy to find through the app. Both scores are a marked improvement from previous years.

KSU can also evolve its apps very quickly as new feedback comes in. “Before OutSystems,” Mike reminisced, “phase two was a joke, something unheard of. Now, we’ve gone through release two, three, four.”

But the most critical benefit of OutSystems is the ability to know precisely how long a project should take and how many resources it’ll require. And for that, reusability is crucial. Sameer highlighted, “That predictability is key. OutSystems has allowed us to be sharp with our estimates and deliver exactly what we promise when we promise.”

The accurate timelines that Sameer and his team now work on have contributed to a better relationship with the business units and allow for better budget and resource management.

As for the backlog, Mike concluded: