The shift from traditional IT to a modern operating model in universities

University leaders describe the problem in plain terms. A request comes in and the answer is "that's with the other team". Everyone is waiting on someone else. The institution is meant to be complicated on the inside and simple for the student, and its systems and processes keep making the complication visible.

The strategy is usually sound. Disconnected systems and siloed teams put friction between students, staff and the services they need. Technology is organised around systems and funded as projects. Projects are delivered and handed over, and operations then carries the service, the technical debt and the backlog, often without anyone owning the result. The operating model is the bottleneck.

Our view is that experience has to organise the whole operating model, from strategy through to execution. Some institutions are moving to agile ways of working, some to product teams, some to experience-led models. The ones making progress bring all three together as one change, and let experience decide who owns what, how teams are shaped, which platforms get built and how money is released.

The stakes have gone up. With international student caps and tighter policy constraining revenue, keeping and satisfying current students is now the main growth lever.

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Recently we hosted a livestream on exactly this topic. Alexis Sauvage, Peter Stokoe and Jesse McMeikan walked through the five shifts, what each one changed in practice and what it took to make. If you want to watch the video, you can watch it here.

The shifts come from a four month operating model redesign at a large Australian university. It has more than 80 departments and units, a workforce of 10,000, and a 300 person technology workforce, two thirds of it project based, running 500 applications. The pattern is common across the sector.

The operating model

The five shifts at a glance

Each shift depends on the one before it, and the fifth feeds back into the first. Together they form a cycle an institution keeps running.

A continuous operating cycle

1. 1

   Organise around experience

2. 2

   Persistent partnership

3. 3

   Platforms and AI

4. 4

   Strategy to value

5. 5

   Invest at the pace of evidence

Evidence from shift 5 feeds back into shift 1.

Five shifts, from and to

Shift From To

1. Organise around experience, not systems

Teams built around systems and projects

Persistent teams that own an experience end to end

2. From hand-offs to persistent partnership

Work passed between the business and IT

One front door, one roadmap and shared ownership

3. Own the platforms, compose the experiences, embed AI throughout

Hundreds of separate applications

A small set of reusable platforms that experience teams build on

4. Shorten the distance from strategy to value

Annual planning and approvals

Strategy, funding and delivery connected all year

5. Invest at the pace of evidence

The whole programme funded up front

Each stage funded when the last one proves value

01 Organise around experience, not systems

From teams built around systems and projects to persistent teams that own an experience end to end.

What we saw IT ran as a traditional project shop, organised around systems and fragmented. Projects were delivered and handed over to operations. New applications kept being added and very few were retired, so the environment grew more complex every year.

The redesign reorganised the work around a small set of experience domains, each with a persistent team accountable for improving it. The first question was where to start. The business case recommended a staged approach, beginning with the student and staff experiences.

Student experience because several system changes were already underway and it was high profile. Staff experience because of pain points people were already feeling. In our experience with other universities, student experience is usually the right place to begin.

What leaders can take from it

• Pick the experiences that matter most, and decide the order
• Be deliberate about the boundaries between experiences
• Build persistent, cross-functional teams
• Align teams to the measures that matter
• Keep the nuance. Platforms, shared services and regulatory work need different constructs

02 From hand-offs to persistent partnership

From work passed between the business and IT to one front door, one roadmap and shared ownership.

What we saw A lot of technology was owned and run by the business, and parts of the business and IT were not talking to each other. Marketing had its own content platform driving the website. Technology was pushing a separate digital experience platform.

The clearest finding was that the change was as much inside IT as inside the business. Both sides needed capability uplift, and business-side roles often had to be formalised.

The culture was consensus driven and collegiate, and the new model gives teams more ownership and more power to decide. Sponsorship from the chief operating officer brought the business side into the work.

What leaders can take from it

• Be explicit about who owns what, on the business side and the digital side
• Give each experience a single front door
• Run the partnership on a shared roadmap, common measures and a quarterly rhythm
• Change both sides of the partnership
• Move from consensus to clear accountability, backed by change support

03 Own the platforms, compose the experiences, embed AI throughout

From hundreds of separate applications to a small set of reusable platforms that experience teams build on.

What we saw More than 500 applications, without full visibility across them. The redesign moved ownership from individual applications to reusable platforms, so experience teams could build on them.

The team structure and the technical architecture were designed in parallel, so each shaped the other. An architecture that could not support autonomous, persistent teams at the experience layer would have been no use.

Timing mattered too. The university was standing up a digital experience platform, so the proposal was to place that platform team with student experience, its first consumer, and separate them later.

What leaders can take from it

• Shift ownership from applications to platforms
• Design the organisation and technology boundaries together
• Set autonomy and guardrails by impact
• Build enough platform runway to get experience teams started
• Put AI into every team's everyday work, with specialist capability where it enables the rest

04 Shorten the distance from strategy to value

From annual planning and approvals to strategy, funding and delivery connected all year.

What we saw Planning, funding, decision rights and architecture sat in different places. Change moved through annual cycles and a project governance model built for large programmes.

The redesign kept a place for projects, for work that needs scale or is tied to vendor contracts. Around 80 per cent of the work can be carried by platforms and experience teams.

Operational insight now finds its way back into strategy. Early identification of students at risk matters, and how often a student logs in is one proxy for it. The model builds signals like that into the quarterly business review, where they shape the planning conversation.

What leaders can take from it

• Use planning and funding levers through the year
• Run projects and persistent teams as one system
• Bring architecture in early
• Feed what teams see on the ground back into strategy each quarter

05 Invest at the pace of evidence

From the whole programme funded up front to each stage funded when the last one proves value.

What we saw The funding model connected straight back to the case for change and the benefits plan. The decision was to avoid releasing all the funds at once.

Investment was sequenced through mobilisation, platform uplift and the priority experience teams, with later stages depending on demonstrated value and organisational readiness.

The workforce model followed the same logic: a stable core, with flexible capacity brought in for a defined period to show value. At each decision gate the university decides whether to continue, and whether to convert key roles to permanent positions.

What leaders can take from it

• Plan progression and decision gates from day one
• Fund the next horizon and use core and flexible capacity deliberately
• Connect measures to real decisions about progression
• Measure experience outcomes, capability and readiness alongside benefits
• Let the evidence reshape the roadmap

Where to start

From case for change to activation

The work ran in four stages, and the university is now moving from design into activation.

1

Case for change

Make the case for people as well as structure

2

Design

Move quickly towards the target state

3

Consultation

Bring HR and change management in early

4

Activation

Move from design into delivery

Talk to us

If you'd like to go deeper on this work, or on related projects that took an experience-led approach to operating model redesign and restructure as institutions modernise, contact us.

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