After a successful return to office, the IT team continued using this program as its primary project tracker and communications tool. Eventually, other departments began using it, helping to standardize processes across teams.
Project Management Implementation Lessons Learned
When working to implement an institutionwide project management system, remember that “visibility without structure is just noise,” Malone says. While her initial instinct was to make every project, budget line and staff assignment visible, she soon realized that “what stakeholders actually needed was the right information at the right level of detail, in real time, without having to chase anyone down for it.”
An institutionwide system must serve a diverse set of needs, but the IT team has built templates that can be customized to fit the criteria of individual campuses and offices. Malone says three lessons have been most impactful:
- Invest time in how data is structured, not just how it’s displayed. “If your intake forms and budget tracking aren’t built on a consistent architecture from the start, your roll-up reporting becomes unreliable fast,” Malone says. “In higher ed IT, where you’re managing everything from infrastructure refreshes to enterprise software rollouts, unreliable data erodes trust quickly.”
- Adoption matters as much as implementation. “You can design a beautiful solution, but if people across the system aren't entering data consistently, your dashboards are lying to leadership,” she says. “I put a lot of effort into making the data-entry experience as low-friction as possible, through automation, forms and conditional logic, so that compliance feels easy rather than burdensome.”
- Transparency must be intentional. “Systemwide visibility into departments such as information security, software licensing and budgeting is sensitive territory,” Malone says. “Part of my role has been designing permission structures that give each stakeholder the access they need, while protecting information that shouldn't be broadly shared.”
LEARN MORE: Customer relationship management software helps manage the student lifecycle.
AI Capabilities Minimize Bottlenecks
A project management solution that includes embedded artificial intelligence capabilities makes it easy for teams to benefit from the value of AI without learning another new tool.
For example, with the tool’s Smart Assist AI feature, “staff who aren’t deeply technical can now ask plain-language questions about their data and get useful answers without having to know how to write a formula or build a report,” Malone says. “That might sound like a small thing, but when you’re in an administrative support role and you need to quickly answer a question from a director about project status or budget utilization, being able to get that answer in seconds rather than digging through rows of data or waiting on someone else is genuinely transformative.”
Having AI tools embedded in work management software offers the potential to reduce what Malone calls “answer bottlenecks.” While information exists in the system, it may not be easily accessible to the people who need it, so they end up asking a person instead.
“When AI tools lower the barrier to querying and interpreting data directly, it frees up the people who would have been answering those questions to focus on higher-value work,” Malone says. “That’s a structural shift, not just a timesaver.”
READ MORE: Automation is one way to optimize costs in higher ed.
Modernizing Administrative Processes Benefits From Automation
For other higher education institutions considering modernizing administrative processes at scale, Malone recommends focusing on and investing heavily in automation. The right automation capabilities go beyond simple notifications and can handle real operational workflows, such as “approval chains, conditional routing, automatic updates triggered by date or status changes, cross-sheet data syncing,” she says. “When you remove manual handoffs from a process, you eliminate the delays and errors that come with them. That’s essential for administrative staff who are often managing high volumes of requests with limited bandwidth.”
Also, if implementing an entirely new work management system seems daunting, Malone says to not overlook the value of consolidation.
“In higher education, where teams are often juggling spreadsheets, shared drives, email threads and three different project tools simultaneously, the operational cost of that fragmentation is enormous,” she says. “Bringing those functions into one place reduces context-switching, improves data integrity and makes cross-functional collaboration significantly easier.”
