Change Is Inevitable.
Make It Count!
Higher education transformation that builds confidence today and readiness for tomorrow.
We Help Universities Move Forward.
True transformation, from the inside out.
Nine Tracks is a higher education transformation consultancy that happens to use technology extremely well. We see universities as living organisations, not machines waiting for a software update.
Change on the inside.
A healthy organisation starts on the inside. Unfortunately, so do most of the problems. It shouldn’t be held together by spreadsheets, workarounds and Dave knowing how everything works. Start here.
Results on the outside.
Nobody on the outside cares about your systems or processes. They don’t care which CRM you use. They care about what they experience. And unfortunately, one bad experience can outweigh a dozen great ones.
Stronger on the inside. Better on the outside. But real transformation goes further. It’s not just about delivering change, but leaving the institution ready to build on it – independent, confident and hungry for more.
Technology is rarely the hardest part.
Nobody wakes up wanting another CRM.
Universities want more of the right students. Better experiences. Stronger relationships. Happier staff. Less repetitive work. Better decisions. Services that feel joined-up rather than stitched together.
Sometimes the answer is more technology. Sometimes it’s less.
We don’t start with a platform and go looking for a problem.
We start with your goals and work out the best way to get there. Sometimes the biggest improvement is simply working out what’s actually worth doing.
Technology Agnostic. Very Picky.
Sometimes it’s not, but often it’s Dynamics 365.
We know Dynamics 365 and Power Platform inside out. We use them because they’re good, not because we have to. If something else fits better, we’ll tell you.
Ready. Set. Wait.
Transformation moves at the speed of organisational readiness.
We’re ready to build. Procurement isn’t. Data isn’t. The user stories aren’t. Dave from Finance is on annual leave.
And that’s okay. Successful transformation isn’t about pretending those constraints don’t exist. It’s about planning for them.
When delivery outruns readiness, things get expensive.
Requirements get rushed. Decisions get deferred. Temporary fixes become permanent. The mysterious Phase 2 bucket gets bigger and bigger while the budget gets smaller and smaller.
Sometimes the right thing is to move quickly. Sometimes it’s to stop, fix the foundations and then move quickly. Knowing the difference matters.
We’ve Been Busy.
Higher education transformation isn’t something you learn from a slide deck.
You learn it when governance slows things down.
When the project needs your best people, but BAU needs them too.
When data turns out not to be quite as clean as everyone hoped.
When the beautifully mapped process meets what people actually do.
When a 10-year roadmap changes on Tuesday.
And when Phase 2 does, thankfully, actually happen.
Our Goal is to Make Ourselves Redundant.
Yes, really.
We see success as leaving an institution better than we found it – with better technology, stronger capability and the confidence to continue without us.
We’re not interested in creating dependency. We’d rather leave you in control, equipped to take things forward and ready for whatever comes next.
What we do.
- Build with you, not around you.
- Transfer knowledge as we go.
- Explain what we’ve built – and why.
- Build capability and independence.
- Design for scalability and sustainability.
- Leave you understanding what you’ve got.
What we don’t.
- Sell dependency disguised as innovation.
- Lock you into proprietary accelerators.
- Retain ownership of your solution.
- Hide complexity to keep ourselves indispensable.
- Push unnecessary licences or subscriptions.
- Sell support for problems we’ve created ourselves.
We’d rather give you a bad truth than a good lie.
You shouldn’t need us forever. You should want us back.
AI Should Give People More Time to Be Human.
Let the machines have the boring stuff.
AI can do plenty of the things people would rather not. So let it. It doesn’t get bored, ask for a pay rise or complain about the pension. Not yet, anyway. Use it to give people more time for the things humans remain rather inconveniently good at.
But It Could Do So Much More!
AI is no longer an ace up your sleeve.
AI is already changing how people work, what teams can do and what organisations need to prepare for. Some of it is exciting. Some of it might make you slightly uncomfortable. All of it is worth thinking about.
One AI can research. Another can analyse. Another can challenge the answer. Another can turn it into action. Give AI agents defined roles, knowledge and boundaries, and they can work together as an agentic workforce.
The question may no longer be whether to let people use AI. Many already are. Give them the skills, tools and guardrails to use it well rather than leaving everyone to work it out for themselves. Used well, AI can remove friction rather than create another problem to manage.
More people want to work with AI – or worry they’ll fall behind without it. Once you’ve learned to work smarter, being told to go back can feel like swapping your calculator for a sheet of paper. The best people want to keep learning. Give them somewhere they can.
AI doesn’t have to replace people. But people who know how to use it can do more, faster. A hardworking team is valuable. A hardworking team that knows how to work smarter is considerably more powerful.
Every new process designed without considering AI risks becoming tomorrow’s technical debt. That doesn’t mean putting AI everywhere. It means asking where it belongs before you build another five-year solution around yesterday’s way of working.
Give each person an assistant. A researcher. An analyst. An adviser. Suddenly the same team can do considerably more – better service, more personalisation, faster answers, more ideas and more time for students. With AI you can get much more from the same team.
Still Here? Something Must Need Changing.
You could keep scrolling, or we can talk about it.
Tell us what’s working, what’s not and what keeps getting pushed into tomorrow. What everyone knows is a problem, but nobody quite knows how to fix. What’s stopping you from making the big leap forward.
You don’t need a perfect brief. We don’t need all the answers. Finding them is part of the job. There’s no magic formula, but understanding the problem is a pretty good place to start.
Let’s talk, shall we?