Current Challenges & Workflow

1. Manual Process:
   • Relies on Google Forms for student preferences, followed by manual clustering/assignment.
   • 10-20% of students remain unassigned due to mismatched preferences ("50 people with all different choices").
2. Imbalance Issues:
   • High demand disparity: Some projects get 10+ team requests, while others get zero, risking customer dissatisfaction.
   • Customers have team limits (e.g., "customer A can take only three teams").
3. Limited Analysis:
   • No capacity to balance teams by skills, gender, or background.
   • Student skill data (e.g., technical stacks) is collected but ignored due to lack of analysis tools.
4. Student Frustration:
   • "Students would cry if not in the team they want."

Expected Solutions from TeamSync

1. Automation & Matching:
   • Fully automate team formation to replace manual clustering.
   • Prioritize skill-based matching over preference-only:"Match students and projects based on technical skills and project wishes, not team preferences."
2. Analytics & Alerts:
   • Highlight unassigned students, skill gaps, or role mismatches.
   • Flag inconsistencies (e.g., if a student claims C++ proficiency but has a poor grade in related courses).
3. Integration:
   • Sync with the university’s digital profile for skills, grades, and project history (e.g., thesis/capstone projects)."Show grades near claimed skills (e.g., Databases course grade next to SQL skill)."
   • Allow skill data to be editable by students (as digital profiles may be outdated).
4. Flexibility:
   • Let instructors "lock" or manually adjust teams post-automation.
   • Support non-technical projects (some "don’t require any skills").

Critical Requirements

• Core Value:

  "Reasonable and correct suggestions/solutions" based on student inputs (preferences + skills).

• Features:

  • Student-facing input forms + admin-facing assignment dashboard.
  • Filters for courses/skills/roles (with fallbacks for skill-agnostic projects).
  • Web-based (not local) for accessibility.

• Privacy/Technical:

  • Minimal data: Email suffices; no sensitive data needed.
  • No stack restrictions ("doesn’t matter for us").

• Pilot Support: Stakeholder willing to test an internal version.

Additional Insights

• Unified Platform: Interest in merging SWP/capstone/thesis projects into one system.