A team of 5 University of Warwick student volunteers won this year’s TCS Tech Challenge at the finale yesterday in London. The TCS (Tata Consulting Services) Challenge pitches teams of students from 6 UK universities against each other in an 8 week real life consulting challenge. The teams, with the help of two TCS mentors, work with a charity local to their university to address an IT need identified by the charity. 

This year, students Sean Gallagher, Delia Teo, Georgios Anagnostopoulos, Tomasz Wlodarczak and Zhen-Yi Chan worked with Andy Winter, CEO of YMCA in Coventry. Their brief was to improve the collection of YMCA’s management data, particularly increasing the ease of reporting incidents across their 6 sites. The team replaced YMCA’s paper-based systems with an online form for reporting incidents which is linked to a dashboard enabling easy reporting and efficient administration.

 YMCA benefit from a new, bespoke IT system and £1000 of prize money, whilst the students won a month’s paid internship with Tata Consulting. From undertaking this volunteering challenge, they have developed business-critical skills such as team work, project management and innovation and they will be presented with a Warwick Volunteers certificate in recognition of the time they have given to benefit a charity in the local community.