There’s plenty of conversation around digital transformation in higher education…
New systems. AI. Better use of data. Student experience. Automation.
But there’s a slightly less exciting question that can make or break all of it:
Who’s actually going to do the work?
For universities, that question is becoming harder to answer. Budgets are tight, internal teams are busy, permanent headcount can be difficult to secure, and transformation projects rarely need the same skills from start to finish.
That’s what we wanted to look at in our new guide, Building the Team Behind Higher Education Transformation.
“Transformation” can mean almost anything
One university might be replacing a student records system, another might be moving to a new VLE, implementing a CRM or trying to make better use of its existing data.
Sometimes it isn’t even about bringing in new technology.
It might be fixing an integration that’s causing problems, improving an existing platform, streamlining a process that’s become unnecessarily complicated or getting more value from systems the university already pays for. The scale varies too.
Not every institution is midway through a huge, multi-year transformation programme. A relatively focused piece of work can still need specialist support.
And this is where resourcing gets interesting!
The team you need in month one probably isn’t the team you need in month nine
Transformation projects tend to move through recognisable stages.
There’s the early planning and discovery work, then design, procurement or implementation. Followed by integration and migration, testing, go-live, and finally adoption.
Different problems appear at different points.
Early on, you might need strong project management and business analysis. During implementation, the pressure might shift towards integration, data or platform expertise. Later, testing, training and change become much more important.
That sounds obvious written down.
But in practice, it’s very easy to end up trying to recruit one person who can somehow do all of it.
We see briefs that ask for a mix of project delivery, technical implementation, stakeholder management, data, training and change experience. There are good generalists out there, of course. But at some point the brief becomes less “well-rounded” and more “unicorn”.
The better question is usually: what does this person actually need to deliver?
Sometimes the gap is expertise and sometimes it’s just capacity.
This came up repeatedly while we were putting the guide together.
Universities often already have good people internally. The issue isn’t always that a particular skill doesn’t exist in the organisation. Sometimes the team is simply full!
A project may need an Integration Developer for six months. A Project Manager might be needed to take ownership of an implementation. A Data Engineer might be required for one defined workstream.
Those aren’t necessarily permanent needs.
Contract resource can make sense here because it gives teams a way to add specialist expertise or extra delivery capacity for the part of the programme where it’s actually needed.
It can also make it easier to change the shape of the team as the project moves on, rather than building a permanent structure around a temporary requirement.
The expensive option isn’t always the one with the highest day rate
There’s another side to this.
Universities are under very real pressure to control costs, so naturally there’s scrutiny around recruitment and external resource.
But delaying a critical hire has a cost too. And so does an under-resourced project. Or a six-month search for someone who ticks every box on an unrealistic job description. Or implementing a new platform without enough consideration for integration, migration, testing or adoption.
As Mike Ward, our Director & Co-Founder, puts it in the guide:
“The cheapest recruitment decision isn’t necessarily the best commercial decision.”
It’s less about defaulting to permanent, contract or consultancy, and more about working out what makes sense for that piece of work.
Build the capability internally where it makes sense. Bring in external expertise where it doesn’t. Use short-term resource where the need is genuinely short term.
Building the team behind the transformation
Our new guide looks at this in more detail, including:
- the typical stages of a higher education transformation programme
- the capabilities that tend to be needed at different points
- example teams across digital assessment, enterprise systems, CRM and data modernisation
- where specialist contract talent can fit alongside internal teams
- common resourcing mistakes
- what our Education team is currently hearing from universities
If you’re planning a transformation project, reviewing an existing team or trying to work out where the gaps might be, you can request your copy of our Building the Team Behind Higher Education Transformation guide, here.
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