ConnectFMS is designed to break the communication barrier between Carnegie Mellon students & faculty, and the staff at Facilities Management Services with regards to campus energy usage. The workflow of this application is quite similar to that of Facebook. Through this application, students, faculty and staff can make posts on energy conservation issues they see around campus by taking a photo and writing a short description. Students, faculty and staff can consequently upvote/downvote on others' posts as well as express their thoughts on certain issues by commenting on others’ posts. Registered FMS staff will be able to view and address issues made through these posts and also make statuses on campus initiatives to go green. Students and faculty/staff will be able to like or comment on FMS statuses. These features will allow communication between the students/faculty and FMS to be more apparent. 

Bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/is373/fms-app 

Heroku: http://connect-fms.herokuapp.com/Connect_FMS/

Click here to view a copy of our report!

Lessons Learned

The first several weeks of the semester we devoted significant effort to research in order to fully determine the most appropriate approach and feature list. The following weeks were devoted to design and development efforts. During this time, we built proficiency with a new development language (Django) and focused on completing the most critical features. We were all able to agree that building a solid MVP with thorough documentation would be the best, thus laying the framework for enhanced features that CBPD can incorporate on their own in the future. Lastly, we learned that the success of a project depends a lot on the client. We were very fortunate to get a chance to work with a client as understanding, helpful and insightful as Azizan, Bertrand and the rest of the CBPD team. Azizan was a very enthusiastic client to work with this semester, and one who is truly passionate about energy efficiency and green building. He worked alongside us for all phases of our project, from handing out surveys to faculty/staff, analyzing surveys and interviewing stakeholders in the research phase to providing members of the CBPD team as resources for whenever we needed insight or help building the application. Azizan proved to us that clients can also act as a much needed resource and show genuine desire to help develop the best possible solution in a doctor-patient relationship. Our team was very grateful to have worked with a client as impactful as Azizan Aziz and Bertrand Lasternas.