Higher education advisory (2024)

Creating an ambitious yet achievable plan for the future requires an approach that looks internally and externally, involves and aligns many stakeholders, and rapidly tests ideas. By broadly engaging people in the process, Buro Happold advisory facilitates a consensus-based approach to diagnose the current state and then craft a vision to differentiate your organization, offerings, and operations. Together, we then define the goals, identify key tactics, and test ideas to reduce risk and build momentum. With a vision or strategic plan in hand, your team will be aligned and ready to enact meaningful changes to your spaces, services, and organization.

Spaces for learning, research, support services, and working need programming and planning that is research-driven, future-focused, and advances institutional strategy. To understand the desired direction and balance of spaces, Buro Happold advisory develops space program scenarios at a category-level (office, open study area, enclosed study area, etc.) then a detailed room-by-room level. This two-step approach to space programming allows us to iterate at a category-level to ensure that we are working in the right direction before jumping into developing the details of a room-by-room space program.

Changes in demographics, technology, and culture require changes in the services you offer, how you provide them, how you organize yourself to deliver, and how you measure your success. Buro Happold advisory facilitates a collaborative process to designing on-campus and online services by defining your service philosophy, portfolio, points, delivery, and providers. Along the way, your team learns the mindset, skill set, and tools of service design so they can continually improve and apply it more broadly.

Most organizational charts don’t reflect how you get work done or what services you offer, and many L&D programs are training sessions people dread and quickly forget. Buro Happold advisory takes a different approach to organizational design and development by using participatory processes so that people design their own future and develop the skills they need to realize it. We clarify, reimagine, and align your purpose, process, roles, structure, partnerships, and support systems. We design and facilitate learning and development activities that enable people to play new roles, use new processes, and work in new ways. You will be better able to align, communicate, and collaborate internally and better adapt externally – often as a follow-up to service design and operational planning or on its own.

Understanding the experience and needs of an increasingly diverse and post-traditional student community requires an approach that is holistic, inclusive, and equity-based. Buro Happold advisory brings a depth of student research methods like interviews, focus groups, and observations, as well as: the leading framework for understanding the student journey – the Student Experience Canvas; a holistic survey for assessing the student experience – Student Experience Snapshot; and extensive expertise collaborating across siloed departments to co-create viable solutions. With a range of experience strategies in hand, your institution will be able to create a more seamless experience and improve student outcomes such as retention and completion.

To understand the current state and identify future opportunities for their people, programs, and places, colleges and universities must combine insightful analysis with innovative stakeholder engagement. Informed by interviews, observations, workshops, surveys, and data mining, Buro Happold advisory combines stories and stats to uncover insights you can act on. Our research and engagement helps you invent the future and stay ahead of the pack, rather than benchmark the past, to improve the spaces and services you offer, how you organize your people, and how you operate.

Managing assets across campus requires a process that combines insightful analysis with innovative and inclusive stakeholder engagement to create a flexible plan for the future. Buro Happold advisory uses an integrated planning approach to analyze the current state, forecast the future, and develop practical strategies to get there. We engage stakeholders from across campus to create a comprehensive plan that provides short- and long-term improvements to provide the right kinds of space, in the right quantity, and in the right place. With a master plan in hand you will be able to assess upcoming opportunities, allocate resources, and flexibly implement the plan in a phased and coordinated way – and understand the operational and organizational changes involved.

Innovative spaces and services require new operational plans that provide the staffing model, operating budget, policies, and processes to succeed. Buro Happold advisory works with colleges and universities to understand their current operating state in terms of spaces, staffing, technology, partners, and finances and design the future operating state to support the coming space and service changes. With a future operating plan in place, institutions can mitigate the risk of and accelerate the adoption of new ideas for spaces and support services – on campus and online.

Most change management programs aren’t change programs at all; they are really top-down communication programs in which employees had little participation or influence in the direction. Not surprisingly, 70% of organizational change efforts fail. Buro Happold advisory takes a different approach, treating change management as an experience design problem. We start with a change-readiness assessment and then design the program based on your change, capacity, and capabilities. We then design, deliver, or advise on communications, training, and pilots. We support you with welcome guides, help-desks, and on-call advice – and then assess the results.

What degree, non-degree, or other academic programs will you offer in the future? What will your enrollment and your faculty and staff populations be? To answer these questions, Buro Happold advisory facilitates an innovative and inclusive academic planning process that engages your stakeholders to look within your institution while also looking externally to understand the competitive landscape and test the feasibility of creating, consolidating, sunsetting, or growing academic programs. We facilitate interactive visioning sessions to get in front of changes facing higher education. We develop projections in student enrollment, faculty, and staff that feed into capital and operational plans.