Higher education · Service transformation & operating model design
Simplifying professional services across a devolved university
A practical set of operating-model options for reducing duplication while protecting the local expertise academic communities relied upon.
- Sector
- Higher education
- Scope
- Institution-wide professional services · Large, globally recognised research university
- Service
- Service transformation & operating model design
01 — The challenge
One of the world's leading research-intensive universities combined significant institutional scale and academic prestige with a highly devolved operating environment. Central teams, faculties and schools had each developed their own professional-service arrangements, creating repeated activity across HR, finance, student support and administration.
Local ownership kept support close to academic communities, but also produced duplication, inconsistent standards and unclear boundaries. The challenge was not simply to centralise. It was to distinguish the work that genuinely depended on local knowledge from activity being repeated without adding local value.
The evolution
Strong local relationships and valuable faculty-level expertise, alongside repeated activity, inconsistent service arrangements and unclear boundaries between central and local teams.
A coherent institution-wide model that standardised and consolidated where it added value while retaining local expertise where proximity to academic communities mattered.
02 — The approach
- Mapped service activity across central and local teams to identify genuine points of difference, unnecessary replication and gaps in ownership.
- Developed credible centralised, federated and hub-and-spoke options so leaders could compare the trade-offs between consistency, efficiency and local responsiveness.
- Set out which capabilities should be institution-wide, which needed to remain close to faculties and schools, and how the two layers would work together.
- Translated the analysis into a clear decision framework and implementation narrative leadership could use to select and mobilise a preferred direction.
03 — The outcome
Leadership gained a practical basis for deciding which activities to consolidate, which to standardise and which to retain locally—along with the rationale for each choice.
The work replaced a blunt centralise-or-devolve debate with a coherent operating-model direction that preserved valuable local expertise while addressing avoidable complexity and duplication.
Anonymised case study.