The average student in UVA McIntire’s M.S. in the Management of Information Technology (MSMIT) program arrives with 10-15 years of professional experience, an accumulated wealth of knowledge that the program’s faculty have used to inform the curriculum’s signature projects. Rather than simply delivering knowledge from the lectern, MSMIT courses put seasoned IT and business professionals to work on solving the issues their own organizations face, then push them to design, defend, and deliver solutions that would hold up in front of a real executive team. And in more than a few cases, they have.
Stefano Grazioli
“Whatever topic I or my colleagues cover, there’s a good chance that somebody in that classroom has already been working in that particular area for the last 10 years of their lives and therefore knows more than we do,” says Professor Stefano Grazioli, MSMIT Program Director. “Our role is to facilitate the conversation among these experts and surface what they know in ways that help everyone else in the class to share that knowledge.”
That philosophy runs through the one-year program, anchored by a major project that treats students not as novices but as the experienced professionals they are.
Sprinting from Problem to Prototype
Chris Maurer
In Module 2, which centers on digital transformation through project and product management, Professor Chris Maurer leads teams through a full Google Design Sprint, a five-stage method for answering business questions through brainstorming, prototyping, and testing hypotheses with customers. The sprint’s five “days” of activity (map, sketch, decide, prototype, and test) are compressed into a working professional’s schedule, with teams deciding whether to spread the stages across weeks or knock them out over a free weekend.
The problems are grounded in fact. Each team builds its sprint on a project review or AI-driven transformation roadmap that a team member has already completed for a real organization, often their own employer. Maurer’s guidance to teams reflects hard-won lessons from professional practice: no proposing solutions until the problem and customer are fully understood, no relying only on direct competitors for inspiration, and no selling your ideas to the users testing your prototype. “Provide background information and context, then get out of their way,” his sprint guidance advises.
Teams must clear instructor checkpoints before advancing between stages, mirroring the stage-gate discipline of real product organizations. The sprint culminates in an interactive prototype, recorded user-testing sessions, a memo written in the Amazon Future Press Release style, and a pitch delivered to an audience of would-be investors and project sponsors, critical skills and experiences for the job market.
Building an Executive-Ready AI Plan
Module 3 tackles what Grazioli calls the program’s fastest-moving territory: digital innovation. The module is refreshed each year so that students are learning about what matters most to businesses at the moment. “These days, it’s largely about artificial intelligence, analytics, agentic,” he says. “You name it; we cover it.”
Jing Gong
The module’s team project, led by Professor Jing Gong, asks collaborating working professionals to design a practical, executive-ready plan for how a real organization can create measurable business value with data, analytics, and AI. Students are not expected to build models, but rather, they’re expected to think end to end, from strategy and capabilities to change management. They’re also expected to defend their plan in a 25-minute presentation before faculty and peers playing the role of the organization’s top management team, such as the CIO, CDO, and CTO.
Each team must choose an established organization where at least one member has firsthand experience, ensuring the plans are steeped in organizational reality rather than generic best practices. Teams address talent, operating models, data infrastructure, adoption, scaling, and responsible AI governance, applying frameworks such as McKinsey’s “Rewired” digital and AI transformation approach.
The stakes often extend beyond the program as well. “Quite a few of the projects are based on initiatives that the students’ organizations are actively considering,” Gong notes.
A Capstone with a Track Record
Peter Gray
The program closes with the Capstone Strategic Project (CSP) in Module 4, taught by Professor Peter Gray. Over four months, teams deeply analyze a publicly traded company and its industry, identify its most crucial competitive challenge, and propose an IT-enabled business initiative that creates new customer value and resists imitation, complete with three-scenario financial projections. Teams then present and defend their business case before a faculty panel.
Gray is emphatic about how the recommendations should originate. “The key is that the idea for the initiative comes from their in-depth analysis of the company’s strategy,” he says.
In 2008, a team examining U.S. hardware chain Lowe’s even had the opportunity to meet with a senior strategy executive who told them the project would be easy: The company needed a better IT system for its contractor business. But after digging into the financials and finding that recessions reliably depress renovation sales while boosting maintenance and repair purchases, the team returned to Lowe’s headquarters near Charlotte, NC, with a different pitch: a purchase-tracking card.
The card remembered the grass seed a customer bought, the furnace filter size, and the unusual shade of pink in a daughter’s bedroom, tying customers to Lowe’s by making repeat purchases effortless. The company implemented it, and it became the My Lowe’s card. Years later, a store manager told Gray the card had created switching costs that kept customers coming back while also reducing in-store labor. “Not only did the idea increase value for customers; it also lowered in-store labor costs,” Gray says. “I call that a pretty strong win.”
The stories continue. A 2012 team studying Lululemon noticed cork bulletin boards in stores where yoga instructors posted their teaching schedules, and proposed an online community connecting the company, its Ambassador instructors, and customers. Nine months after the team sent its final deck to a company contact, Lululemon launched a strikingly similar feature and app. “Hats off to the team for pitching an idea that the company actually used,” Gray says.
In 2024, a team studying Duolingo proposed a set of AI features; shortly after their final presentation, Gray notes the company came to similar conclusion as MSMIT students themselves and announced a remarkably similar offering. “It really shows the power of the learning experience when students can propose something that looks a lot like what company insiders do,” he says.
Ultimately, Gray feels that he’s giving students the skills that would “let them parachute into any industry, look at a company, tear apart its strategy, figure out what the problems are, and then propose an IT-based business initiative that creates new sources of customer value.”
Consulting Across Borders
The program’s project-based ethos crosses hemispheres. An optional global segment takes students to Mendoza, Argentina, for a week of intensive consulting with a single organization, interviewing users, developers, managers, and owners before delivering recommendations on how the company can better use IT. The work in Argentine wine country has been such a successful program that it earned Grazioli a UVA Excellence in Education Abroad Award.
“It’s an eye-opening, mind-expanding experience for our students because it shows them what is possible with information technology in a different context,” Grazioli says, noting that Argentine firms often change direction far faster than their U.S. counterparts.
Across all four modules, the pattern holds: real organizations, real constraints, and deliverables built to executive standards. Students graduate having already done the work of IT leadership, sometimes with a company’s product roadmap to show for it. As Grazioli says of new technological waves arriving in AI, the timing could not be better to dive in and learn: “Get your surfboard and go to the beach!”
