MTECH Connect 2025

Explore technical projects and concepts submitted by community members

This presentation introduces "The AI Scaffold," a systematic workflow for project managers to integrate Google NotebookLM responsibly across the entire project lifecycle. We demonstrate how to use this AI-powered structure to transform raw project artifacts into cohesive, actionable, and verifiable plans.

Attendees will learn to:

• Access resources, templates and sample prompt library, to develop their own AI scaffold for project management.
• Use PMBOK-informed templates and selected project sources to generate verifiable project artifacts in NotebookLM, ensuring outputs are grounded in fact.
• Apply the "AI Scaffold" methodology to build a defensible project foundation, following the logical sequence from discovery documentation to a summary schedule to a business case, project charter, and a stakeholder analysis.
• Learn practical strategies to "level-up" productivity during project execution, such as creating a reusable prompt library for synthesizing operational logs into status reports.

This workshop will dive in some MS Excel tools using data validation, nested formulas, macros, and VBA to help standardize device documentation efforts, ensuring information is valid and consistent across multiple electronic devices and cards.

The same tools can be used to standardize other efforts where repetitive tasks need to be automated with little knowledge in scripting.

Attendees will learn how to use:

• Nested formulas in Excel
• Macros in Excel
• VBA in Excel

This presentation will explain:

• What a homelab is
• Why people homelab 
• Why I homelab
• What it has taught me 
• How I apply that knowledge in my day-to-day duties
• Resources to get started

It will also include a look at the community aspect of homelabbing and how connections are the basis of career growth in today’s world, and conclude with the side-benefits of homelabbing, which are data sovereignty and control. 

Success in the workplace is tied to emotional intelligence. Research shows that it is twice as important as technical skills. This session will:

• Explain what emotional intelligence is
• Provide examples to show how you can benefit from it
• Offer some skills to help you build your emotional intelligence

• Define emotional intelligence
• Explain the benefits of emotional intelligence
• Determine when you need to shift your emotional response

• Learning how your brain operates
• Exploring mindfulness techniques to support brain integration
• Developing practical strategies to strengthen emotional intelligence
• Obtaining resources to improve your emotional intelligence

This presentation showcases how Michigan Engineering developed specialized AI chatbots to address critical challenges in research administration and security, and built the following complementary systems serving different stakeholder needs:

• Research Administration Assistant (LAURA) supporting sponsored research staff, 
• Research Security Engine (CORSE) providing general research security guidance, and 
• Security Assistant for Regulated Research (SCARR) addressing specialized compliance requirements.

This panel will share technical implementation approaches, lessons learned about responsible AI deployment in compliance-heavy environments, and practical frameworks for identifying similar opportunities across university operations.

Attendees will gain practical insights into developing AI solutions that address real workforce challenges in research administration and university IT operations:

• Understand AI Implementation Strategies
• Evaluate Organizational Readiness
• Navigate Technical Challenges
• Build Internal Support
• Deploy Responsibly
• Foster Cross-Unit Collaboration

John Walsh (Health Information Technology & Services - HITS), Candice Wilson and Shanelle Boluyt (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research - ICPSR) have been empowering team culture at UM for almost 40 combined years of service.

Attendees will learn how three scrappy IT veterans and a fearless manager built a cloud-native service portfolio and an adaptive team. They will also learn how this leader group's focus on each other and the culture helped their team weather the inevitable high-stakes failures and successes navigating the IT unknown, and propel their careers forward.

A panel of IT subject matter experts and management professionals will convene for a "fireside chat" exploring how embracing growth, leading with and without authority, and uplifting colleagues within our tech community has impacted their respective careers. 

Panelists will share insights on learning from setbacks, cultivating curiosity, leveraging technology, and supporting career development in a rapidly changing professional landscape. This panel seeks to inspire and equip everyone to learn, lead, and lift others—painting a vision for a more collaborative, empowered, and inclusive Michigan Technology Community.

This collaborative workshop is aimed at fostering professional growth and community engagement through effective mentorship and networking, and will provide participants with actionable strategies to cultivate meaningful professional relationships at every career stage. 

The goal is to create a dynamic platform for knowledge exchange, skill development, and cross-campus collaboration, ultimately strengthening the collective professional community.

• Early-Career Professionals: Focus will be on finding and connecting with mentors, integrating into the broader tech community, and the benefits of peer mentoring.
• Mid-Career Professionals: This section will explore the transition to becoming a mentor, developing essential leadership skills, and the importance of making cross-campus connections to broaden influence.
• Late-Career Professionals: The final segment will address leading large-scale mentoring programs, ensuring effective knowledge transfer to the next generation, and building a lasting professional legacy.

Attendees will learn to:

• Strengthen Professional Networks
• Acquire Mentorship Tools
• Foster a Supportive Environment
• Enhance the Professional Ecosystem

Moracle is a Maizey project designed to serve as an "oracular muse" (i.e., in-house expert) on ICPSR's (i.e., Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research) vast source code repositories for its engineers. 

Moracle's purpose is to facilitate acquisition of knowledge about the group;s applications, and reduce the frequency and cost of context switching for the most senior engineers, whose deep institutional knowledge has resulted in being regularly pulled away from their own work to help others.

This presentation will cover the following:

• Design, development, and deployment of Moracle
• Construction of an application designed to expose the code to Maizey in a format it can consume
• Economics of the project for the department

“Hopes without a method to achieve them will remain mere hopes.” ~W. Edwards Deming

This session will explain how to manage one's career, learning tools based on real world stories of continuous learning and progressing towards goals. 

Attendees will learn and practice valuable and actionable skills that can help advance their career no matter what phase it is in, and not just leaving them hoping for the best. 

Software quality means different things to different people – and is thus hard to define – but we recognize the absence of quality when products fail to meet our needs. 

This presentation will explore the many components of software quality and then discuss how to integrate quality throughout the Agile environment. Continual conversations and multiple feedback loops keep the focus on quality. 

It will cover the characteristics of good Acceptance Criteria and the role of the Three Amigos, in addition to reviewing how the alphabet soup of BDD, TDD, ATDD, UAT, and other acronyms contribute to quality. 

Participants will come away with practical ideas that can be readily applied in their own environments to improve software quality, and learn how to:

• Incorporate software quality concepts to prevent defects in Agile software developmentxz
• Recognize effective acceptance criteria and scenarios, in order to provide good feature descriptions that will assure product success
• Understand and apply the many feedback loops that occur throughout Agile development

You don’t need a title to make a difference. In this interactive session, attendees will discover how trust, relationships, and small actions can create real change, regardless of their role. 

Attendees will learn to:

• Recognize the difference between influence and authority
• Focus their energy using the Circle of Influence
• Design small, achievable actions that build momentum
• Navigate common barriers to change
• Find where and how to make a difference using tools like the Circle of Influence and Small Wins Theory

Benefits include:

• Gaining confidence in your ability to shape positive change
• Learning how to lead at any level
• Creating a personalized action plan

Explore technical projects and concepts submitted by community members

As cloud services continue to evolve, API literacy has become an essential skill for IT professionals. APIs serve as the foundation for managing data and integrating services in the cloud. 

This workshop will guide attendees through the fundamentals of using APIs and demonstrate how to publish APIs via the API Directory. 

It will also provide practical knowledge and actionable steps for leveraging APIs in modern cloud environments.

Onboarding A2 Maizey is a generative AI chatbot that helps new University of Michigan staff on the Ann Arbor campus quickly find answers to common onboarding questions. Integrating with over 3,600 public U-M web pages, it delivers instant, reliable information and reduces the workload for HR staff and managers. 

Attendees will learn:

• Best practices for launching AI tools in higher education
• See how OnboardingA2 Maizey benefits new staff
• View live demonstrations. 

Michigan Online is transforming how we build educational technology, creating exceptional career growth opportunities for technologists. This presentation shares our journey from traditional software delivery to empowered product teams building a platform for 25 million global learners.

This presentation will:

• Reveal how we're abandoning the "feature factory" model where developers merely code requirements
• Demonstrate using concrete examples of how team members evolve from task-executors to problem-solvers: engineers who shape product strategy, QA professionals who architect platforms, and developers who become user advocates
• Share the hiring philosophy—seeking missionaries over mercenaries—and what this means for career-minded technologists

Attendees will learn practical strategies for advancement:

• Building T-shaped skills across disciplines
• Transitioning from delivery to discovery mindsets
• Recognizing organizations that truly empower teams versus those merely claiming transformation

Explore how LinkedIn Learning can support your professional growth—from people skills to leadership development—in this 45-minute session. 

Learn to navigate the platform, discover relevant courses, and share resources with your team or colleagues. 

Plus, see a live demo of how to find relevant content with our new AI-powered coach to personalize your learning journey and unlock career development tools to help you grow.