In universities, a project can be finished long before the change has actually happened.

Institutions invest significant effort in strategies, transformation programmes, and new platforms designed to improve how research, teaching, and administration operate. Governance milestones are met, systems go live, organisational changes are implemented, and delivery teams move on to the next initiative.

Yet across faculties and professional services, the lived reality often looks different. Local workarounds persist and old practices quietly return. The technology and processes are in place, but people are not always working differently in their day-to-day work.

This gap between delivery and adoption is a familiar pattern in higher education. Universities operate as federated institutions, where authority is distributed and local priorities shape how change is interpreted. What works in one faculty may not translate to another, and change that appears complete at a programme level can remain unevenly adopted.

This session explores the “last mile” of institutional change — where successful delivery must become everyday practice. It asks a simple question: why does so much well-delivered change fail to take hold?

Drawing on experience from the University of Auckland Change Practice, this session shares examples of where change has embedded and where it has struggled. It explores not only the conditions that support adoption, but how a Strategy to Adoption approach can help universities move beyond successful project delivery towards sustained change.

Because delivering the project is only the beginning. The real test of change is whether the institution changes with it.