Rapid Improvement Delivery
for Universities
Build coalition-led projects that deliver impactful change quickly – while building the confidence and capability of your people.
Why Universities need Rapid Improvement
Universities face growing pressure to deliver change faster – yet the way people work often slows it down:
- reliance on overworked managers leads to burn out and bottlenecks
- slow decision-making leads to delays
- lack of ownership leads to inertia
- lack of agency leads to permission-seeking and hesitancy
Traditional consultancy or top-down transformation often fails to shift mindsets or build sustained capability.
What if you could deliver real change and strengthen leadership and agency across your institution/faculty/school, and do it quickly?
What is Rapid Improvement Delivery?
Rapid Improvement Delivery is a way of working that brings together a coalition of academics, professional services staff, managers and sometimes even students, to deliver a live focused improvement project in just a few weeks. You get tangible project outcomes, and a shift in mindset.
Participants develop distributed leadership, greater agency and the confidence to keep improving long after the project ends.
Key features:
- Coalition-formation that builds ground-up leadership of improvements
- Bring in and include different perspectives
- Tangible and valuable project outcomes
- Strengthen networks, communication and soft skills
Why do a coalition-led project?
For your people:
- Learn to collaborate across silos, identify issues and work on solutions together
- Feel more empowered and engaged
- Learn relational and facilitative skills that last a lifetime
- Step up into leadership and authority
- Build stronger networks and bonds
For your institution:
- Deliver improvements faster with more creativity and ownership
- Build internal capacity for continuous improvement
- Embed a mindset of distributed leadership
- Improve engagement, retention and quality outcomes
The Rapid Improvement Project Toolkit gives you a step-by-step framework for building a coalition that delivers - including templates, checklists, and facilitation tips drawn from our work with several UK universities.
Why are we giving this away?
Because we’ve seen how powerful this approach can be. We want more universities to experience it – and if you find the toolkit useful, you’ll know who to call when you want to go further.
Aston University
Aston asked us to help overcome organisational inertia. We supported three cross-team working groups to deliver impactful projects that shifted mindsets and unlocked people’s agency. There was visible and tangible evidence of behaviour change and increased agency across the organisation.
Goldsmiths
Goldsmiths invited us to work with a pilot group of informal leaders to support them in building coalitions and peer networks in order to make change more effective. The aim was to empower staff who were leading without formal authority during a reorganisation.
Have a question or a problem you need to think through or get some help with? Get in touch with us using this form, or book a discovery call here