Projects as Drivers of Institutional Change? Insights from a Practitioner Discourse (TURN Conference 2025)

Editor’s note: This is a guest contribution.

This article is based on the introductory talk “What happens after a project ends in (digitally supported) higher education development, and how do we keep the door to the digital space open?” at the TURN Conference 2025.

We all know the story: projects come – and projects go. And all too often, they take their ideas, visions, and tools with them. What remains is the question: How do we preserve what has been built? And what stays when the project period ends and the funding runs out?

Projects in Digital Higher Education Development

In the context of digitally supported higher education development, where innovations are short-lived and change processes take time, sustainability becomes the central challenge.

University teaching in particular has experienced a digitalization boost in recent years through the pandemic and new funding initiatives. Third-party funded projects are increasingly seen as drivers of institutional change and as temporary innovation spaces where new possibilities for university teaching can be tested and then made permanent.

With a view to the challenges of sustainable implementation, we would like to present two perspectives: We look across projects at typical stumbling blocks in sustaining innovations at universities. And we report from the University of Bamberg, where a project advisory board provides lasting impetus.

We will see: The obstacles – lack of resources, insufficient support – are often quickly identified. The success factors, however, lie more between the lines: bold decisions, a supportive culture, and a shared will to shape change.

Typical Stumbling Blocks in Sustainability

Many universities struggle with the same challenges. Three typical stumbling blocks can be identified that we want to examine.

The illustrative transcript excerpts come from interviews that Lorenz Mrohs conducted as part of his dissertation on the governance and organization of higher education development projects. He interviewed project coordinators about project structures and task distributions, decision-making processes, and collaboration in projects. And about how the effects of such university projects and their prospects for sustainability are perceived.

The first example cites limited or lacking personnel resources as a challenge:

On the surface, this shows the problem that project funds are used to fill positions at universities that are not only used for project work but are also tasked with other responsibilities.

At the same time, a more general problem of universities becomes visible: on the one hand, fixed-term contracts for employees who are actually tasked with permanent duties, and simultaneously resource shortages at universities that lead to permanent tasks being financed through third-party funded positions.

Inadequate infrastructure at universities is also described as a stumbling block:

This shows that projects are used as innovation spaces, as we all know. In the example, a new examination system is being tested and problems are discovered that were not visible before – that’s learning first and foremost, and that’s okay. The question now is: How is this dealt with? Is the situation left as it was because the funds aren’t there, or are other ways found to deal with these problems?

Additionally, lack of support from university leadership is described as a challenge for projects:

In this example, it is research excellence that crowds out topics like innovation in university teaching and makes them appear secondary. The prioritization of other topics shows that not only do goal conflicts exist at universities, but these are additionally intensified by resource conflicts.

For development projects and their success, a strategically framed change process therefore seems necessary, in which development projects are accompanied and supported by decision-makers at their universities.

And it also raises the familiar question of whether we want to talk about “research and teaching” or rather “teaching and research” at universities.

In summary, our cases reveal a bundle of recurring bottlenecks:

• scarce (personnel) resources that affect and can even impair universities and their projects;
• challenges that only become visible through the project and require agile capabilities to respond to new findings;
• the question of how university leadership can strategically guide development processes despite goal and resource conflicts.

Particularly where leadership framing is required, an intermediate zone emerges where operational project logics and strategic expectations meet. One way to address this zone and create links between project and permanent structure is to establish an accompanying project advisory board.

The Project Advisory Board as an Accompanying Body

The second case study concerns a project advisory board at the University of Bamberg, in which all status groups as well as an external expert are represented. The example shows how the topic of sustainability was taken up and reflected upon in an “accompanying group.”

Already in the first meeting (2022) of the project-accompanying advisory board, it became clear that the question of sustaining digital structures and developments was present from the very beginning. The project spokespersons emphasized the necessity of finding viable ways to integrate the impulses created by the project into university structures in the long term – not only in the form of technical systems, but as part of a sustainable digital teaching culture.

The challenges addressed concerned classic themes of many universities: strained staffing situations in service units, problems regarding the implementation of new functionalities in the LMS, or a cautious approach to data protection issues.

Already in this first meeting, the advisory board recommended bundling these challenges and opportunities in a strategy paper to specifically support the university leadership in developing a sustainable digitalization strategy.

The advisory board thus early became a forum where strategic questions, resource bottlenecks, and structural challenges could be openly addressed and thus brought to the attention of university leadership.

In the following meetings (2023, 2024), sustainability remained a recurring theme. In 2023, a list with an overview of the current “status of software application sustainability” was discussed and prioritized. And in 2024, “low-threshold sustainabilities from within the project were considered, which could also be linked to a new proposal.” (Excerpt from Advisory Board Meeting Minutes, July 2024)

This shows a form of connection possibility through further suitable project proposals that enable this thematically and content-wise. Two things become apparent: On one hand, it becomes visible how important thematic funding lines are for the continuous development and sustainability of innovations; at the same time, a high risk also shows here: after all, funding lines can end and follow-up proposals may not be successful.

Overall, it appears that in an advisory board, central themes can repeatedly be brought to the agenda that would otherwise easily get lost in day-to-day project work – and that these themes can thus be made visible at leadership level.

At the same time, the limitations of its effectiveness become apparent: The advisory board can provide impulses, structure discussions, and identify problems – but it can rarely solve them itself. Structural conditions such as financing, personnel shortages, data protection uncertainties, and institutional readiness for the permanent adoption of innovative practices therefore remain critical hindering factors.

Against this background, it becomes clear: Advisory boards are important catalysts for sustainability – but they need resonance spaces within university leadership and concrete connecting structures to be able to unfold their effect in the long term.

The Opportunities in the Challenges

The two case studies show different structural challenges that can be attributed to typical resource shortages at universities and limited strategic accompaniment of projects.

Conversely, they also point to opportunities:

• Organizational learning: Through projects, limited resources become visible at various points, along with the realization that sustainable development and change processes cannot be carried out through project formats alone. Projects thus become a “mirror” that makes problematic structures and organizational weaknesses visible, just as it reveals unexpected potentials and thereby opens up occasions for deeper organizational learning processes.
• Potential for prioritization: Resource scarcity can also be understood as an opportunity for prioritization. When not everything is possible at once, projects can be used to test where the greatest added value lies for studies, teaching, or organization. Projects then act like a “filter” that makes visible which innovations are worth transferring into permanent structures.
• Impetus for strategic positioning: A didactically and strategically smart involvement of university leadership is important: After all, it is university leadership that must handle changes at universities at different points (projects, politics, etc.) and consider different goal and resource conflicts.

Questions We Must Ask

For projects to be successful, we must find ways to deal with these and similar challenges. Central to this may be addressing the following questions:

• We have seen that projects are also used to manage resource bottlenecks – to what extent can this already be considered with regard to sustainability?
• We have seen that involving the decisive stakeholders at universities is central to the “fight for sustainability.” At the same time, these stakeholders face multiple challenges and suffer from time constraints – which engagement strategies appear effective and sensible?
• And we have seen that continuity can also arise through funding lines – But is it always sensible to hope for the next call for proposals, and what would be alternatives?

Results of the Practitioner Discourse

For the practitioner discourse at TURN Conference 2025, Dr. Ivo van den Berk (Team Leader Knowledge Transfer, Foundation for Innovation in Higher Education Teaching), Prof. Dr. Viera Pirker (Vice President for Studies and Teaching, Goethe University Frankfurt), and Prof. Dr. Steffen Prowe (Professor of Microbiology, Berlin University of Applied Sciences) were invited. We summarize the three most important points from the discussion between panel and audience.

1) Involved University Leadership and Strategic Framing

There was agreement that projects are more successful when university leadership not only supports but provides clear strategic framing. Third-party funded projects have stronger effects when their acquisition is aligned with the strategic goals of the university.

Two practical consequences:

• Early strategic review: Already in the proposal phase, it should be centrally reviewed how the “form of embedding” looks and how good the fit is with university-wide strategies and actual needs.
• Accompaniment rather than control: Leadership involvement should be integrative-supportive, not detached-driving. The goal is to enable links to curricula, departments, and services.

2) Communication Beyond the Project

Several voices emphasized that communication must extend beyond the project team into the university. In loosely coupled organizations, communication is a central means of creating functioning connection points.

Concrete practices:

• Stakeholder mapping: Identify relevant actors for adoption, legitimacy, and resources. Plan when and how they will be involved.
• Regular feedback loops: Brief updates to program committees, faculty bodies, central facilities, and student representatives open paths for integration and reduce parallel structures.
• Format diversity: Combine brief written updates, show-and-tell formats, and small consultations to enable mutual adaptation.

3) “Forming Alliances”: Coalitions and Learning Networks

The idea of “forming alliances” found approval. What is meant are alliances between projects and universities facing similar challenges. The wheel is rarely reinvented. Lateral connections accelerate learning and diffusion.

Steps in practice:

• Communities of Practice within the university that connect projects with similar themes or tools.
• Inter-institutional alliances that share preliminary work, mistakes, and insights.

In summary, the outlined stumbling blocks and the work of the project advisory board indicate that the quality of coupling between project and the entire university is decisive for the impact of university projects. University-typical challenges must be considered and smart coupling mechanisms found.

Future projects can benefit when university-typical and -specific challenges are identified early, systematically observed during the course, and framed and addressed in a university-specific manner, so that viable paths toward permanent structure become recognizable.