Collaboration Plus Coordination Equals Success Under Pressure
Beginning in late January and concluding in early June, Pang-Chiung Hsiang, developer lead on the Application and Development Operations - PeopleSoft (ADO-PS) team, spearheaded a tiered series of critical projects. These projects, which were crucial for aligning Northwestern’s CAESAR with new federal requirements for Federal Tax Information reporting and the new Student Aid Index, were a testament to the strong partnerships between collaborators from Administrative Systems and Cyberinfrastructure teams.
The invaluable contributions of two Distributed Application Platform Services (DAPS) senior systems administrators, Terry Collins and James Neal, Database Administration (DBA) Senior Database Systems Engineer Allan Sun, and Database Systems Engineer Lead Kurt Peight, along with support from the Office of Portfolio Management (OPM) Information Security Analyst Patrick Sweeney, and IT Cyber Service Operation Quality Control Specialists Lori Blum and Daniel Edwards were instrumental in the successful completion of these projects.
The work to meet the new requirements was a significant and complex challenge, demanding a high degree of accuracy and completion with very short notice to meet compliance standards. However, the overwhelming success of the projects and the enthusiastic thanks received from our business partners in the Office of Financial Aid are a testament to the level of service excellence Northwestern IT teams can achieve through coordinated cross-department approaches to our work.
The projects applied several bug fixes and form changes and created new fields and system functionality. In aggregate, this work addressed the following federal financial aid changes:
- FAFSA simplification, beginning with the 2024–2025 application cycle
- Minimized need for families of students seeking Title IV funding to provide estimated income to meet IRS data requirements (FTI – Federal Tax Information)
- Revised federal financial aid calculations using the new Student Aid Index (SAI) to better reflect a family’s financial capacity
- Changes to expand Pell Grant eligibility
- Creation of a new Federal Tax Information; Student Aid Internet Gateway (FTI-SAIG ) mailbox for institutions to access the new 24–25 ISIR files
- Improvements to the Federal Direct Loans Process beginning with the 2024–2025 application cycle
Pang and the entire Northwestern IT team did amazing work for us this year and were lifesavers. The number of changes that we experienced between the extremely delayed start of the FAFSA/ISIR process this year and now is mind-blowing (seriously, we got two today) and is still ongoing. Much of this falls on the day-to-day compliance and processes within the financial aid office, but it also falls on the IT team as well…I was so grateful for all the hard work they all did. This 2024–2025 process is actually far from over, but it is such a relief to know that we have such a dedicated team.”