Formula SAE

Overview

As a treasurer and project manager for Columbia University Formula Racing, I found that our old order and project management methods were clunky, outdated, and difficult to use. To implement a better system of requesting orders, I set up a project in Jira capable of tracking order requests through the ordering cycle, automatically calculating order totals, sending weekly notification emails, presenting information in a much more user-friendly manner, and preventing request modification based on user status. I also expanded the capabilities of our Jira site to include project management systems for the 2023 and 2024 competition vehicles that automatically generates weekly reports for each subteam to inform assistant chiefs of tasks that are falling behind schedule.

Details

I picked Jira since it could be used for order management as well as project management, reducing the number of websites club members would need to familiarize themselves with. For the new ordering management platform, my primary goal was to design a simple, user-friendly system in Jira that would remedy several issues we had with previous iterations including, but not limited to, orders going missing, a lack of order tracking, and difficulty reading/entering order information. With the newly designed system, members of the team are able to submit and track part requests, preventing the need for them to ask treasurers and chiefs about the status of their order. Additionally, the electrical and mechanical engineering chiefs, along with the President and Vice President of the club, are the only Jira users capable of approving and denying requests, preventing orders from getting accidentally approved, deleted, or moved around. To further prevent accidental approvals, the chiefs are limited to approving orders under their specific engineering domains (i.e., the mechanical engineering chief can only approve mechanical engineering related part orders). To simplify order entry, treasurers are presented information in a format nearly identical to the ordering platform used by the university, Quartzy, allowing for quick and easy order entry.

To further improve the system, weekly emails containing a list of the order requests with links to each request submitted in the past week are sent to the chiefs and treasurers at preferred hours, removing the need to sort through data to find orders that have not yet been placed.

If you would like information on how exactly I set this up in Jira, please send me an email!