How to Accelerate Your Higher Education Website Timeline (Without Sacrificing Quality)

→ What is the current workload capacity?
If your team is already at 100% capacity, adding website content creation to their plates is going to be a challenge. We’ve seen this pattern repeatedly: teams commit to the project with the best intentions, then get buried under their regular responsibilities.

The solution? Map out what everyone’s current commitments actually are and be realistic about how much time people can dedicate per week. “Our marketing manager can commit 5 hours per week to this” is infinitely more useful than “we’ll make time as needed.”

→ Internal communications and change management needs:
Who needs to be brought along on this journey? What’s your internal communication plan? How will you handle resistance or competing priorities?

This is crucial: change management is one of the biggest challenges in any brand and website redesign—bringing everyone along on the journey, building buy-in, and preparing them to contribute. And while the internal navigation and relationship alignment is on you, we can help provide the materials and guidance you need to make those conversations successful.

→ Busy seasons and blackout periods:
Map your academic calendar and identify when your team will have zero bandwidth. Enrolment seasons, start and end of semesters, commencement, major events—these aren’t just “busy times.” They’re periods when asking for feedback or scheduling presentations simply won’t work.

Share this with your agency during the statement of work planning. Build these into the timeline as unavoidable constraints, not things you’ll try to work around.

The conversation to have:

1. With your project team: “What’s realistically on your plates for the next 12-18 months?”
2. With leadership: “What other major initiatives are happening that might compete for attention?”
3. With departments: “When are your absolute worst times for us to need things from you?”

→ Build your DARCI chart:

• Who makes final decisions?
• Who needs to review and approve key deliverables before decisions are final?
• Who provides input and consultation on certain deliverables?
• Who needs to be informed but isn’t in the decision-making process?

Share this with the agency at kickoff. When there’s confusion about who can approve something, you can reference this instead of having the same conversation repeatedly.

→ Clarify the leadership involvement model:
If you’re reporting to senior leadership, have this conversation before the project starts:

• How do they want to stay informed?
• When do they need to be in the room vs. when do they trust you to decide?
• What’s their realistic feedback turnaround time?
• What’s the plan B if they can’t make a scheduled review?

We’ve seen projects stall when this isn’t clear upfront. The project team thinks they can make decisions, then leadership gets involved and changes direction. Or leadership wants to be consulted but their schedule makes that impossible within the project timeline.

→ Establish who takes what to leadership for approval:
What needs executive sign-off vs. what can the project lead approve? How long does that approval process typically take? Are there board meetings you need to work around?

Map this out so it’s visible in the timeline, not a surprise when you’re trying to launch.

The ideal structure we’ve seen:
A marketing lead who can make day-to-day decisions. An IT or technical representative who’s consulted on requirements. A content or marketing manager as the primary coordinator—the person who consolidates feedback internally instead of having the agency manage seven different stakeholder relationships.

Other stakeholders get consulted but aren’t involved in every decision. There’s a clear process for escalating to leadership when needed.

This structure keeps momentum while respecting that multiple perspectives matter.

Content is almost always the thing that extends timelines. Not because writing is slow, but because the coordination of getting content created, reviewed, and approved across a complex organization takes time.

→ Content audit:
What exists on your current site? What needs to migrate vs. what needs to be created fresh? What content gaps do you have?

Do this audit before kickoff and bring the findings to discovery sessions.

→ Realistic timeline for content delivery:
Who’s responsible for creating each type of content? How long will it realistically take them? What’s their approval process?

Build this timeline and share it with the agency. “Program pages will take us 4 weeks to write and get department approval” is actionable. “We’ll get you content when you need it” isn’t.

→ Assign content ownership:
Who owns program pages? Who’s coordinating with departments? Who’s responsible for getting faculty bios? Who’s the final approver before it goes to the agency?

Clear ownership prevents the pattern we see constantly: we ask for something, it gets forwarded internally, no one responds because everyone thinks someone else is handling it, we follow up multiple times, and weeks go by.

→ Create documentation the agency can reference:
An org chart showing key stakeholders and reporting structure. A program structure breakdown showing schools, departments, programs, and specializations. Clear documentation of who owns what content across the organization.

This might seem basic, but we’ve had projects where we’re weeks in and still trying to understand how programs are organized or who we should be talking to about specific content.

→ Identify stakeholders for involvement:
Who should be in discovery interviews? Which departments need to be consulted? Who would be valuable for user research—students, faculty, staff?

Make introductions and set expectations with these people before we reach out. “The agency will be contacting you for an interview” is much smoother than cold-emailing people who don’t know why we’re asking questions.

→ Give your UX team a source of truth:
Don’t make them guess at your structure or piece it together from conversations. Provide clear documentation upfront. Update it if things change during the project.

This saves time in discovery and prevents costly misunderstandings later.

→ The week after kickoff:
Are you slammed with enrolment work, or can you participate in a workshop? If you’re unavailable, should we push kickoff to when you actually have bandwidth?

→ First month commitments:
Can you commit to a weekly or biweekly meeting cadence? Who might be on vacation or unavailable? Are there conflicts with other major initiatives?

→ Extended leaves:
Is anyone on your core team taking parental leave, sabbatical, or extended vacation during the project? What’s the coverage plan? Should we adjust the timeline to work around it?

These aren’t reasons not to start the project. They’re just things we need to plan for instead of discovering them when that person suddenly isn’t available.

→ Talk to IT early:
What are the security requirements? What’s the hosting situation? What integrations are needed—CRM systems, authentication, payment processing? What’s the approval process for new tools or platforms? How long does IT review typically take?

Getting IT involved from day one prevents the scenario where we’re ready to launch and suddenly need approvals that take six weeks.

→ Identify all approval layers:
What needs department approval? What requires faculty sign-off? What goes to leadership or the board? When do those approvals happen—quarterly board meetings, monthly leadership meetings? How long does each approval process typically take?

We talked about this in Part 1, but it’s worth repeating: the surprise approval layers that surface during Client Acceptance Testing are what extend timelines most unexpectedly. “Oh, departments need to review this again” or “This needs to go to the board” when you thought you were in the final stretch.

Map these out upfront so they’re visible constraints in the timeline, not surprises.

→ Document accessibility requirements:
What standard do you need to meet? Do you report to a regulatory board? Do you have an internal accessibility team? What’s their review process and timeline?

Build accessibility compliance into the timeline from the start. It affects design decisions, development approaches, and QA processes. Treating it as an afterthought creates problems.

The pattern we see:
Projects that surface these requirements during discovery run smoothly. Projects that discover them in week 15 scramble to accommodate them, which affects other clients we have booked and creates stress for everyone.