Universities across the sector continue to invest heavily in student systems, yet many large scale initiatives struggle to deliver the student experience improvements they promise. Too often, technology selection and implementation run ahead of business change, leaving teams to retrofit processes, expectations and ways of working after the fact.

This presentation shares a joint case study from Student Administration and ICT on the delivery of a major Timetabling and Class Registration initiative, where we deliberately started with business change and worked together from the outset to define the experience we wanted students to have.

Rather than treating timetabling as a technical implementation, the project focused first on shared outcomes, service principles and operational realities across academic areas, student administration and digital teams. These foundations shaped a collaborative approach to requirements definition, governance and decision making, enabling a stronger partnership with our vendor and clearer alignment between product capability and institutional needs.

The session will explore:
•    How a business led change approach reframed the problem and built shared ownership
•    What it took to develop requirements collaboratively across functional and technical teams
•    How aligning early with a vendor supported, rather than constrained, the desired student experience
•    Practical lessons learned that others can apply to complex, cross institutional student system initiatives

Attendees will leave with concrete insights into how stronger collaboration between business and ICT teams can reduce risk, improve delivery confidence, and ultimately create more meaningful improvements for students.