By Jason Cunningham
A team of students from Central Connecticut State University placed first in the annual Travelers IT Case Competition on Nov. 19.
The CCSU team won a prize of $1000 for their first place win. The University of Connecticut, last year’s winner, placed second, with the Worcester Polytechnic Institute grabbing third. The University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management and Quinnipiac University also had teams compete in the competition. The required powerpoint presentation portions were prepared for the submission date of Nov. 17. The actual competition was held on Nov. 19 at the Travelers Complex in Hartford.
Seniors Andrew Brucker, Derrick Karle, Christopher Albert and Kristina Larsen, all of whom are management information system majors in the School of Business, worked underneath the advisement of team sponsors professor Joo Eng Lee-Partridge and assistant professor Jason Snyder.
“The students get to work with real-life problems, but it’s vague enough to allow creativity in providing their solutions,” said Lee-Partridge.
Karle was instrumental in putting together the team’s powerpoint presentation and did the team’s introduction during the actual presentation.
“We were presenting at the corporate level, so we were actually presenting our case to some Traveler’s executives,” said Karle.
All four of the participating students are looking to either intern at Travelers or get involved in Traveler’s Leadership Development Program.
“I thought our students represented us well. They were very confident,” said Lee-Partridge.
About a month before the competition a member of the Travelers IT Case Competition committee sends out an invitation to specific schools that they have their eye on. The schools have two weeks to form a team, with CCSU offering an open invitation to all students. The students interested send their resumes to the team sponsors, who nominate who they see best fit to compete.
Travelers sent CCSU’s team the case on Nov. 1. Each team had the option of discussing one of four issues highlighted in the case that will help strengthen the fictional corporation InsurAll. This year’s issues were posed as opportunities that could strengthen InsurAll’s position in the insurance industry, including telecommuting, employee skills gap, generations in the workplace and text messaging as topics for the 20 minute presentations to revolve around. CSSU’s team chose telecommuting.
“The goal was to come up with a way to develop the idea they came up with and to package it in a way that was memorable. So the students came up with a solution, a three-step solution, planning, reviewing and optimizing the company’s telecommunications, telecommuting program,” said Snyder. “I suggested that they made it easy to remember and that they used something that could be repeated several times during the presentation, so hay came up with the PRO Tips solution: plan, review, optimize. Then they developed a circle to show it’s a continuous process and they made the circle into a little logo for the bottom of screen.”
The CCSU team’s presentation tied in severe snowstorms, last February’s in particular, to a loss of productivity. They were able to show how telecommunications could have allowed employees to work from home during the bad weather conditions. Teams had to discuss why they chose their topic, the business needs that were present and what technologies could aid in fulfilling them, the recommendations they proposed to address the problem, the advantages and disadvantages of their recommendation and the impact on both the business and technology areas of the company. Each team presentation had an additional 10 minutes at the end to take questions.
“Participating in the competition was like an additional class…It was a relief to finally finish…taking first place was the icing on the cake,” said Karle.
