Overview of TrackMaster: Membership Tracking Tool for U-M Centers and Institutes

Summary

TrackMaster is a membership tracking tool for University of Michigan and Michigan Medicine research centers and institutes. Built by students in the ITS Summer Internship for the Eisenberg Family Depression Center, it allows centers to better support their members, manage their teams' work, and report on metrics that measure center's progress towards their mission.

Screenshot of TrackMaster home page displaying menus in dark blue font (e.g. People, Engagement, Collaboration, Settings), a woman waving on the left side, and quick links on the right side.

 

Overview

Introduction

TrackMaster is a people and metrics management tool for U-M centers, institutes and departments. It can be thought of as a customer relationship management (CRM) tool, but built specifically to fill the needs of U-M centers that operate on a membership basis.  It is built on top of SharePoint Online, so it is HIPAA compliant and can be easily deployed to existing HITS, ITS or LSA IT infrastructure. TrackMaster provides:

  • Centralized access to information on members, prospective members, vendors, center staff, and other stakeholders.
  • Ability to record and track service utilization.
  • Referrals to services and membership.
  • Reports for key center metrics.
  • Tools for collaboration between center staff.
  • Automatic sync of MCommunity groups and MCommunity directory information for all internal contacts.

TrackMaster, by democratization of information, will enable teams to:

  • Increase understanding of stakeholders.
  • Manage relationships more effectively.
  • Understand usage of current offerings.
  • Identify service or resource gaps.

 

Architecture

TrackMaster primarily utilizes SharePoint Online as a web platform. However, TrackMaster brings together information that is scattered on many other systems throughout the University of Michigan.

  • SharePoint Online. The main interface to the application, containing custom lists, edit forms, and collaboration tools.
     
  • Power Automate. Used for automating many tasks such as determining center membership based on information from MCommunity groups, performing automated data cleaning tasks, sending bulk emails to members, and performing basic administrative tasks.
     
  • PowerBI / Tableau. Used for reporting and visualizations, connecting SharePoint data with data from specific Oracle databases such as Michigan Research Experts' Publications Data and eResearch grants and awards data (future).
     
  • Python / PHP / REST APIs. Due to tight security restrictions working in a healthcare IT environment, certain scripts and tools hosted externally are needed to automate moving data. For example, a Python script can be used for exporting U-M MCommunity group members to files that Power Automate cloud can process inside the Michigan Medicine environment. Alternatively, a PHP script can be used to query MCommunity's API and allow PowerAutomate to access the data through a dynamic RSS feed. TrackMaster can also utilize the MCommunity API directly for teams that have an approved API account.
     
  • MCommunity. Used as the source of truth for group and center memberships, and to capture changes to contact information and U-M affiliation status.
     
  • Michigan Medicine Groups. Used for access control when deployed to the Michigan Medicine Office 365 environment. Not needed when deployed to the University of Michigan Office 365 environment.
     
  • Depression Center Knowledge Base. This knowledge base, which runs on TeamDynamix, is used for documentation.
     
  • GitHub. Version control for all code and automation scripts.

 

 

Documentation

All documentation for TrackMaster is available in the Eisenberg Family Depression Center's knowledge base.

 

Where to go next?

 

 

Notes

Recognition

A huge thank you to the ITS Summer Internship teams who created TrackMaster for the Eisenberg Family Depression Center! The project teams include:

ITS Summer Internship 2023 Project Cohort:

ITS Summer Internship 2024 Project Cohort:

 

Resources

 

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