Assessment Center IT Modernisation

The assessment center for colonels is where the IDF assesses lieutenant-colonels for promotion to colonel. Candidates go through psychological tests and questionnaires, individual and group simulations and personal interviews, and the confidential results are one of the sources for promotion and placement decisions.

That puts the computers at the centre of a high-stakes day. Every candidate must get the same system, nothing may break or pop up in the middle of an exam, and a faulty computer has to be back in a known state quickly. Yet each computer was prepared on its own, one at a time, without one organised way to build it or restore it.

• High-stakes, confidential assessments of officers
• Every candidate needs an identical station
• Computers prepared one at a time
• No quick way back to a known state

I moved everything that is the same on every computer into one unified Windows image: Hebrew Windows 10 Pro with Hebrew Office 2021, everyday tools, the same Start menu and taskbar, and exam-day settings built in. It installs from one USB stick with an answer file that answers every other setup question: the technician only picks the disk.

A short setup kit then does what differs from machine to machine: the station's own name and domain join, the IDF boot logo and a desktop-lockdown step, each one logged. Behind the stations is the server side, which Noam Shadmi and I set up together: a Windows Server domain controller, shared drives for the exam files and an Exchange mail server, running as virtual machines with a backup copy.

The center's IT went from preparing each computer on its own to one organised, repeatable workflow: build the image once, install any station from one USB stick, and finish it with a few logged steps. 44 stations in 16 rooms were installed from the image, and about 12 assessment cycles of four days each ran on them. Preparing a station took 20 minutes instead of 4–6 hours by hand, and stations were reinstalled from the USB stick 7 times.

On every station a candidate gets the same system, apps and settings, with the exam-day protections built in. A faulty station goes back to the known state from the same USB stick, and every step leaves a log, so what happened on each laptop can be checked. As the common setup moved into the image, setting up each computer shrank from 24 steps to 9.

I was in charge of modernising the assessment center's IT, from the plan to the rollout. I worked out what the stations need on an assessment day, then planned, tested and built the whole station side on my own: the unified Windows image and its answer file, the setup kit and its logs, and the one-step domain join. Noam Shadmi and I set up the server side together: the domain controller, the shared drives and the Exchange mail server.

I used Gemini and ChatGPT as planning partners: I wrote my requirements as a prompt and asked for the exact commands, then tried the plan on real hardware. When the first method failed, I moved to the standard enterprise method (a reference laptop, sysprep and a captured image), tested the kit function by function, and verified the rollout in the logs. The AI made me faster; the design, the testing and the result are mine.