Institutional data lived across dozens of disconnected systems, split into three categories that rarely told the same story. Leaders across the university had learned to quietly adjust numbers before sending them up the chain, a workaround that only deepened the distrust it was meant to paper over. The university had already committed to a new platform to fix this. What it hadn’t built was a reason for anyone to believe the numbers coming out of it.
Case Study
Aligning a divided campus around a data platform rollout.
A research university had already committed to a new institutional data platform, but the rollout was being managed as a technical install, not a solution for the people who would use it. We stepped in to rebuild trust in the data itself and align a divided campus behind it.
Engagement at-a-glance
Industry:
Education
Organization size:
~ 8,200 employees
Services:
Enterprise System Implementation
Enterprise/Data Architecture
Facilitation & Experience Design
Project & Program Delivery
Enterprise/Data Architecture
Facilitation & Experience Design
Project & Program Delivery
The Challenge
Nobody trusted the numbers.
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Three data sources, three different truths
Government-reported figures, accreditation data, and internal operational numbers routinely disagreed with each other, and departments had built their own manual workarounds to reconcile the differences before anyone upstream saw them. The university had already come close to losing accreditation for one college after reported numbers turned out to be wrong.
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No one who had run an implementation like this before
University leadership and IT staff came from academic and administrative backgrounds, not enterprise software delivery, and had no internal playbook for managing a rollout of this scope while keeping their day jobs running.
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Resistance nobody had a plan to work through
Long-standing tension between departments meant several stakeholder groups had real reasons to want the project to fail, and no one inside the university was positioned to bring them into the process instead of around it.
Our Approach
Reframing a technology rollout into an organizational one.
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1
Assessed the current state and documented the risk
Ran a discovery and assessment phase that laid out exactly where the existing implementation approach would fall short, producing the report that became the basis for the next phase of work.
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2
Built the project visibility the university never had
Introduced a weekly status reporting cadence, giving leadership consistent line of sight into a project that had previously been opaque even to its own sponsors.
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3
Identified resistant stakeholders and engaged them directly
Mapped out which groups had reservations about the initiative and worked with them individually rather than routing around them, ahead of a multi-day alignment workshop.
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4
Facilitated a 36-person alignment workshop across campus
Brought together stakeholders from departments with a documented history of friction, sponsored by the Provost and Senior VP, to agree on requirements, governance, and success metrics for the platform.
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5
Began building a data governance plan across all three data categories
Started defining how the university should govern, define, and manage institutional data going forward, so the platform launch rests on a durable foundation instead of another one-off fix.
Value Delivered
A rollout the campus is finally willing to trust.
Turned an opaque project into one leadership can actually see
A weekly status reporting cadence gave senior leadership consistent visibility into the project for the first time.
Moved resistant stakeholders from skeptics to supporters
Several attendees who had real reasons to want the project to fail left the alignment workshop saying they understood its value and were ready to support it.
Scoped a phased rollout instead of a campus-wide guess
Phase 1 targets roughly 30 users in the Provost’s office and among deans, with a university-wide license already in place to expand further as adoption grows.
Started the data governance framework the university never had
A plan now in progress to define and manage institutional data across all three reporting categories, intended to outlast this engagement and give the university a durable source of truth.
Results that reflect the work behind them.
36
Stakeholders convened in a single alignment workshop, including groups with documented organizational conflict
2
Phases secured, as the discovery and assessment work directly led to a Phase 2 statement of work
~30
Initial users in the Phase 1 rollout, with a university-wide license path to more than 8,200 employees
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