Turning Decentralised Complexity Into Coordinated Delivery

Cambridge’s Business Analysis, Product Management, and Delivery Management needs sit inside one of the most complex and decentralised environments that Herd as worked with – 31 colleges, roughly 150 departments, and a portfolio of transformation programmes all operating with their own priorities and ways of working. Change happening at this scale needed a shared foundation: a common understanding of what “good” looked like, and standards that could travel across departmental boundaries without losing relevance locally.

We started by establishing a clear Business Analysis service definition – a shared vision, consistent standards, and practical ways of working that departments, colleges, and programmes could actually adopt, rather than a framework that looked good on paper but stalled at the first college with different needs.

From there, the engagement grew into a genuinely wide-ranging portfolio of discovery and delivery work. We led discovery for an Electronic Document Management System, working with senior stakeholders to define requirements and shape a scalable approach. For Identity and Access Management, we aligned needs across all 31 colleges and around 150 departments, while mentoring internal staff so the capability stayed in-house for the long term. Across HR, we mapped an estate of around 40 applications to close the gap between as-is and to-be states, and stepped into a multi-year HR Transformation Programme part-way through to recover its process and test case work.

Our strategic business architecture service helped introduce a new way of thinking too – connecting business capabilities to digital services, and advising on best practice for making that link visible and useful.

The work has touched nearly every corner of the University’s digital landscape: curriculum data management and timetabling, student payments policy, postgraduate funding and admissions journeys, and a security review of Moodle covering around 240,000 users. Alongside the University, we worked directly with Microsoft on a Fabric and Power BI reporting project, including HR reporting configuration, design, recovery, and UAT testing.

Delivery Management has been embedded across numerous portfolios – coaching teams in practical Agile delivery and clearing longstanding blockers in early-stage projects. In Product Management, fractional product leadership at ‘Product Director’ level has shaped two complex product-focused strategies, bringing focus, a clearer narrative, and value-led prioritisation to the Academic Research function.

We helped to establish an ‘Opportunity Pipeline’ approach, allowing Cambridge’s new ideas to be explored more rapidly, and enable faster portfolio prioritisation & focus. Throughout the engagement, the emphasis remained the same as it was on day one: build capability that lasts, work at the pace each part of the University needs, and keep the story of change simple even when the environment isn’t.