Your task is to find commonality among a group of subsidiaries with different use cases and different audiences, allowing them to work within the same system without excluding their unique aspects. Instead of final end-users, you focus on the people in the middle to find that magical intersection where all their needs can combine into one solution.

After this common ground is established, you need to figure out how to extract implementable ideas from it. You must remain focused on this common ground. If you don’t, you risk isolating groups or individuals. They feel disempowered, so they strike out on their own to find solutions within or outside of the system.

And even when new solutions are rolled out successfully, they can fall apart over time due to a lack of persistence.

If your university is one of these “mixed” models, where the umbrella organization has limited (or no) authority to mandate standards, there are four key tasks that need to be done to manage the archipelago successfully.

• Do The Research
• Build Bridges
• Verify Solutions
• Measure and Iterate