In one project, students designed an application that monitors power plants, providing real-time operating statistics as well as summaries that help managers optimize maintenance investment. It was clear that managers above the level of an individual power plant would want an application like this, but buy-in from lower levels might be harder to achieve; managers are often reluctant to submit themselves to measurement by their bosses.

The best way to build support, Liguori???s students found, was to offer everyone involved useful information, so they added diagnostic features to the app that help plant managers isolate problems with their machinery, as well as contextual documentation that helps workers get to solutions faster. ???Once [the plant staff] saw that they would be getting more data out of this, they bought into it,??? says Rebby Bliss, one of the students developing the project.