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 often where that friction builds up.
Becoming experience-led is intuitive. Making it work through the operating model takes a number of connected shifts. Experience teams alone are not enough: partnership, platforms, decision-making and investment all need to evolve with them. Some institutions are moving to agile ways of working, some to product teams, some to experience-led models. The ones making progress treat them as connected changes, and let experience inform 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.
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 thinking draws on recent operating model work with an Australian university, alongside patterns we are seeing across higher education.
Access the presentation slides
OPERATING MODEL
The 5 shifts
These shifts reinforce one another, with evidence from the fifth informing what to prioritise and evolve next. Together they form a cycle an institution keeps running.
| Shift | From | To |
|---|---|---|
| 01Organise around experience, not systems | Teams built around systems and projects | Persistent teams that own an experience end to end |
| 02From hand-offs to persistent partnership | Work passed between the business and IT | One front door, one roadmap and shared ownership |
| 03Own the platforms, compose the experiences, embed AI throughout | Hundreds of separate applications | A small set of reusable platforms that experience teams build on |
| 04Shorten the distance from strategy to value | Annual planning and approvals | Dynamic investment, portfolio orchestration and delivery through guardrails |
| 05Invest at the pace of evidence | The whole programme funded up front | Enough of the next horizon funded to generate evidence |
01Organise around experienceOrganise around experience, not systemsFrom 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. The point is to deliberately identify which experiences matter most in the institution’s context, and to be thoughtful about the boundaries between them.
02Persistent partnershipFrom hand-offs to persistent partnershipFrom work passed between the business and IT to one front door, one roadmap and shared ownership.
What we saw
Different parts of the university owned different elements of the experience, with business-led technology and centrally managed digital platforms not always evolving as one.
The answer was not to centralise ownership of an experience, particularly in a federated university. It was to enable the different parts of the institution to operate as one experience, with shared outcomes, a shared roadmap and shared prioritisation.
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.
03Platforms and AIOwn the platforms, compose the experiences, embed AI throughoutFrom hundreds of separate applications to a small set of reusable platforms that experience teams build on.
What we saw
Hundreds of 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.
The aim was enough platform runway to get experience teams moving without each one recreating the same capability, but not waiting for the perfect platform architecture. The shape and boundaries of experience and platform teams can then evolve as the technology, maturity and scale evolve.
Timing mattered too. The university was standing up a digital experience platform. With the digital experience platform initially serving the student experience, co-locating that capability created useful proximity early on, with the team boundary evolving as other experiences begin to consume the platform.
04Strategy to valueShorten the distance from strategy to valueFrom annual planning and approvals to dynamic investment, portfolio orchestration and delivery through guardrails.
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 connected three layers: dynamic strategic investment, portfolio orchestration and delivery through guardrails. Architecture connects those layers and enables more distributed decision-making. Projects keep a place for work that needs scale or is tied to vendor contracts.
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.
05Evidence-led investmentInvest at the pace of evidenceFrom the whole programme funded up front to enough of the next horizon funded to generate evidence, then the next investment decision.
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 evidence across outcomes, sustainability and maturity.
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 point the university decides whether to continue, adapt, scale, convert or stop.
Universities do not need persistent funding from day one to start building persistent capability. Transformation or project funding can establish the initial teams and demonstrate value, and proven capability is progressively converted into the persistent model.
Where to start
Start with an experience that matters
Build enough capability around it to learn, and use the evidence to shape what comes next.
- 01
Choose the experience
Pick one that matters, and be thoughtful about its boundaries.
- 02
Build enough capability to learn
A persistent team, partnership and platform runway.
- 03
Use the evidence
Continue, adapt, scale, convert or stop.
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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