| PROJECT SPOTLIGHT | There is a particular kind of pressure that lands on IT leaders in higher education. It does not announce itself cleanly. It arrives as a wave of competing demands – a cyber resilience initiative that cannot wait, a student-facing digital system that is creaking, a governance overhaul that has been deferred one term too many – and it lands all at once, usually when half your permanent team is already committed elsewhere.
What we have found, working with universities across the UK, is that the institutions navigating this best are not the ones with the biggest internal headcount. They are the ones that have fundamentally rethought how they resource project delivery.
Here is what that looks like in practice.
Governance does not fix itself – but it can be rebuilt quickly with the right resource
We recently worked with a leading UK university on a programme that had grown considerably in scope and complexity. With over 25 individual work packages running simultaneously, the cracks in governance were starting to show. There was no consistent change request process. Risks were being managed informally. Senior leadership had no clean line of sight to programme status.
Rather than attempting a slow internal restructure, the university engaged a Stoneseed Programme Manager and PMO Lead under our PMaaS model. Within weeks, a formal Programme Plan was in place, complete with embedded review cycles across all work packages. A Plan-on-a-Page gave the senior leadership team the strategic visibility they needed. Change requests moved from informal conversations to an auditable, structured process.
The lesson here is not simply that governance matters – most IT leaders already know that. It is that governance can be rebuilt faster than most people expect, if you bring in someone who has done it before and does not need six months to find their feet.
The best-run universities we work with have spoken openly about the value of being able to draw on Project Managers and Business Analysts as and when projects require them, rather than committing to a fixed five-day-a-week engagement. That flexibility is not just a commercial convenience. It means that when a governance crisis like the one above emerges, the right expertise can be mobilised quickly – and wound down just as cleanly once the work is done.
Student-facing systems are IT projects – treat them as such
There is a tendency in higher education to treat student-facing technology as something that sits outside mainstream IT project delivery. The student finance system, the enrolment platform, the facilities booking portal – these are often managed as administrative functions rather than as the complex, multi-stakeholder system implementations they actually are.
We have worked across several universities on exactly these types of projects. A bespoke student finance application required full workflow design, integration with existing finance systems, validation processes for data accuracy and compliance, and coordinated user acceptance testing – all while finance staff continued their day-to-day operations. A student enrolment system implementation involved gathering requirements from academic and administrative stakeholders simultaneously, managing vendor selection, overseeing a phased rollout across multiple departments and providing go-live support before handing over cleanly to BAU.
A student facilities portal – the kind of thing students use daily to book rooms, access campus services and manage their university experience – required API integration with existing campus management systems, mobile and browser deployment, and accessibility compliance testing.
And increasingly, layered on top of all of this is AI.
Platforms like nebulaONE – a generative AI gateway built on Microsoft Azure and already in use at institutions including London Business School – are giving universities the ability to deploy AI tools across the student and staff experience in a governed, secure way. Course-aware AI assistants. Admissions support. Research acceleration tools. The capability is real and it is moving quickly.
But here is where it gets interesting from a resourcing perspective. The value of a platform like nebulaONE does not come from deploying it – it comes from understanding what it should do, for whom, and how it fits into existing workflows. That is Business Analysis work. Before a single AI agent goes live, someone needs to map the student support processes it will touch, identify where automation genuinely reduces friction versus where it creates new problems, and document the requirements that will shape how the tool is configured.
Institutions that skip this step – and many do – find themselves with an AI platform that staff do not trust, students do not use, and IT cannot easily govern. A Business Analyst embedded in the project from discovery through to deployment makes a substantial difference to the quality of what gets built and the speed at which it gets adopted.
Once that discovery and requirements work is complete, the baton passes. The BA hands over a clear, documented picture of what needs to be built and why – and a Project Manager picks it up to drive the delivery. Vendor management, implementation planning, testing coordination, go-live support, transition to BAU. Two distinct skill sets, deployed sequentially, each for exactly as long as the project needs them.
This is where the PMaaS model earns its keep. Rather than hiring both roles permanently – or asking one person to stretch across both – institutions can draw on a BA for the discovery phase and transition cleanly to a PM for delivery, all through a single flexible arrangement. The resource scales with the project, not the other way around.
Digital transformation is meaningless without a plan for digital skills
One of the more interesting projects we have supported in higher education was a three-month research programme at a university with an ambitious goal: to become the most digitally sophisticated institution in the UK.
Before a single system was procured or a single platform deployed, the university wanted to understand the gap between where it was and where it needed to be. That meant engaging student-facing staff, operational staff, students themselves and external employers – mapping current digital skills provision, evaluating institutional digital maturity and assessing what graduate digital fluency actually needed to look like in the eyes of the organisations hiring those graduates.
This kind of structured discovery work is easy to skip when you are under delivery pressure. It is also one of the most valuable investments an institution can make. The findings shaped the institution’s technology strategy in ways that would have been impossible to arrive at through internal assumption alone.
We also supported a separate multi-university initiative focused on enhancing digital knowledge and capability among the student population directly – coordinating platform rollout, content development with academic stakeholders and support enablement processes. The most forward-thinking institutions we work with understand this kind of investment in digital capability as an IT delivery challenge, not just an academic one.
Cyber security is a project, not just a posture
Universities are an attractive target. Large, distributed IT estates. Thousands of users with varying levels of security awareness. Research data that carries significant commercial and reputational value. Regulatory compliance requirements that are tightening.
We have worked across multiple universities on cyber resilience initiatives that needed to be treated as proper managed projects – not handed to an already stretched internal team to absorb alongside everything else. That means comprehensive security assessments across IT infrastructure, implementation of security tooling and monitoring, development of incident response procedures and coordinated security awareness training at an institutional level.
The governance uplift required to meet regulatory compliance requirements alone can be a substantial programme of work. Bringing in a dedicated Project Manager to own that delivery – rather than having it drift as a secondary priority – makes a measurable difference to pace and outcome.
The broader lesson for IT leaders
Higher education operates in a way that makes the limitations of traditional resource models very visible, very quickly. Academic calendars create natural peaks and troughs. Student-facing systems have unforgiving go-live deadlines. Research programmes have fixed funding windows. You cannot afford to have a Project Manager sitting idle through a quiet period, and you equally cannot afford to not have one when a critical initiative lands.
The PMaaS model was built to address exactly this kind of challenge. It is not unique to higher education – we work across banking, legal, utilities, construction and more – but universities have an unusually clear line of sight to the cost of getting resourcing wrong.
If you are an IT leader in higher education thinking about how to manage your project pipeline through the next academic year, we would be happy to talk through how other institutions are approaching it.
Get in touch with the Stoneseed team at info@stoneseed.co.uk or call 01623 723 910.
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