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- Service Management Workshop: Turn Your Data Into Dashboards
- Student Supervision: Boosting ROI for Student Employees
SIGUCCS Academy Service Management Workshop: Turn Your Data Into Dashboards
Target Audience: Helpdesk managers, user support specialists, IT supervisors and directors, application, service, and endpoint managers, and data-adjacent professionals.
Tired of scrolling through spreadsheets? In this two-part SIGUCCS Academy workshop, you’ll learn how to turn those raw data files into clean, interactive dashboards that give your team the answers they need—fast.
Bring your own dataset (from helpdesk systems, surveys, inventory—anything you use) and learn hands-on how to import, clean, and transform it using Excel and Power Query. Throughout the workshop, you’ll work directly with your own data to build something your team can actually use. The example data the presenter is using will be available if you don’t have your own data available.
In Part 1, you’ll learn how to import, clean, and transform data using Excel and Power Query. We’ll walk through practical, repeatable techniques that will help you make messy data manageable—without needing advanced Excel skills.
In Part 2, you’ll turn that cleaned data into a functional dashboard. You’ll use Excel Tables and Slicers to create interactive filters, giving your team the ability to explore the data on their own. Then, you’ll use Pivot Tables to build summary views that quickly answer common questions.
You’ll leave with a working file you can take back to your team and repeatable skills that help you do more with the data you already have.
This workshop is all about developing skills to change your contribution from “just reporting” to surfacing stories your data tells—a perfect fit for professionals and organizations moving from quills to quantum.
Required Materials
To ensure a successful hands-on experience, attendees should bring their own laptop with Microsoft Excel installed. Participants are encouraged to bring a sample dataset to build a dashboard they can use immediately when returning to their institution.
What You’ll Learn
Participation in the SIGUCCS Academy is free with your registration and practical skills you learn in Academy workshops help make the case for institutional support to attend the conference.
- Automated data transformation techniques that minimize manual data cleaning to prepare messy datasets.
- User-centric dashboard design using slicers and pivot tables to create self-service reports.
- Repeatable connection design to ensure dashboards remain current with one-click.
- Data governance best practices developed through peer collaboration to ensure institutional data is handled securely and accurately.
- Troubleshooting and debugging skills gained by solving live data challenges alongside IT colleagues.
- Proficiency with your own device to build a functional dashboard with your own data.
Workshop participants will have the opportunity to earn an ACM SIGUCCS microcredential and leave with a new or strengthened connection to the supportive SIGUCCS professional community, ongoing peer support that lasts beyond the conference.
About the Instructor: Scott Trimmer
Scott Trimmer is the Director of the Learning Commons at Cuyahoga Community College’s Eastern Campus, where he leads a cross-functional team supporting student success, academic technology, and campus-wide learning initiatives. With a background in computer science and an MBA in organizational leadership, Scott specializes in translating complex systems into approachable, data-informed solutions for staff, faculty, and students.
After more than ten years fielding Excel questions at a 1000+ employee university, he became skilled at turning messy processes into clean, usable tools. He now brings that mindset to his work at the College, creating dashboards, improving workflows, and helping teams adopt technology in ways that actually make their work easier. Scott’s colleagues often joke that there’s very little he doesn’t try to organize in a spreadsheet.
SIGUCCS Academy Student Supervision: Boosting ROI for Student Employees
Target Audience: Managers and Supervisors of Student Employees, IT Directors focused on talent development.
Student employees are essential to IT in higher education, yet their full potential often remains untapped. Tapping this potential feels like an insurmountable burden to your already full schedule. This two-part SIGUCCS Academy workshop is designed to provide you with a strategic, low-effort approach to maximizing the return on investment (ROI) for both student employees and your department. We’ll explore how a small upfront investment of time leads to significantly more engaged, productive, and fulfilled student workers.
Part 1 introduces the “aptitude and ambition” meeting—a brief, structured conversation that helps uncover a student worker’s skills, interests, and career goals. This isn’t about adding another task to your plate; it’s about shifting your approach to better understand their skills, interests, and career aspirations beyond their immediate job description and introduce practical, low-effort strategies for crafting specific projects and opportunities tailored to these individual insights.
In Part 2, we’ll focus on how to align this insight with your team’s real-world needs. You’ll learn how to delegate tasks that genuinely contribute to student development while simultaneously freeing up your time and increasing departmental output.
By the end of this workshop, you’ll have actionable techniques to transform your student employee program into a powerful engine for talent development and departmental success, all without significantly increasing your supervisory workload.
SIGUCCS 2026 invites us to rethink and revolutionize IT—why not start with how we grow our next generation of IT professionals?
What You’ll Learn
Participation in the SIGUCCS Academy is free with your registration and practical skills you learn in Academy workshops help make the case for institutional support to attend the conference.
- Interview techniques to quickly identify and leverage hidden student employee skills.
- Methods for aligning your team’s technical backlog with student goals.
- Low-effort delegation techniques that increase student accountability and reduce daily oversight.
- A repeatable process for developmental feedback, improving student worker retention and quality.
- Skills for systematic talent mapping, making our student team a stronger internal technical pipeline.
- A strategy to transform our student team into a higher-capacity unit, completing more high-value tasks without increasing my management time.
Workshop participants will have the opportunity to earn an ACM SIGUCCS microcredential and leave with a new or strengthened connection to the supportive SIGUCCS professional community, ongoing peer support that lasts beyond the conference.
About the Instructor: Elizabeth Young
Elizabeth is an Enterprise Application Administrator/Developer at Lewis & Clark College with over 30 years of experience in higher education. Beyond the technical scope of her role, she is a dedicated student manager who has guided teams ranging from parking enforcement officers to Salesforce-certified interns. She is deeply interested in the intersection of student employment and career readiness, working to ensure that on-campus jobs provide a strong foundation for students’ future aspirations. Elizabeth also applies her leadership skills to her local community, volunteering with her son’s Scout troop and co-running a local theatre company.