The stakeholder maze, Ian Barcarse, Nicole Woodall & Jessie Johnston | EvolveDigital Toronto 2026
Summary
This fireside chat from EvolveDigital Toronto 2026 brings together Nicole Woodall (Director of Digital Strategy, Communications, Public Affairs and Marketing at Sheridan College) and Ian Barcarse (Director of Marketing and Brand Strategy at Sheridan College), facilitated by Jessie Johnston (Associate PMO at Evolving Web), to discuss stakeholder management and cross-functional collaboration during a major digital transformation at a Canadian college. Sheridan is in the midst of migrating off a legacy CMS (Sitecore) it has used for 15–17 years onto Drupal, while simultaneously navigating a higher-ed funding crisis, staff reductions, and compressed timelines.
The conversation opens with the facilitator's personal reflection on spending a decade in a 'rogue department' in higher ed and only later recognising the damage such siloing causes — a framing that grounds the whole session in honest self-awareness. Nicole and Ian describe their core approach to stakeholder triage: asking deep probing questions when requests come in. What looks like 'just one web page' frequently reveals an entire underfunded project, a passion initiative likely to die within a semester, or a gap that needs enterprise-level strategy. This curiosity-first posture has repositioned their 40-person central communications and marketing team from a 'doers-on-demand' model — accepting tickets — to trusted strategic advisors.
On managing large stakeholder groups and avoiding design-by-committee, Nicole gives a concrete example: program pages that enrollment, registrarial, faculty, and marketing teams all want to own. The team consistently grounds contentious decisions in student user data, reminding stakeholders that prospective students aged 17–18 are the primary audience, not internal staff who have the pages open on their desktops all day. Ian adds that the team uses pilot programs, phased roadmaps, and parking-lot frameworks to satisfy stakeholders' desire for newness without derailing core work — and increasingly creates self-serve brand templates so one solved problem actually solves five to ten similar requests simultaneously.
The financial crisis facing Ontario colleges has paradoxically clarified strategic priorities. Nicole describes how the pressure to consolidate onto open-source, shared platforms has become a driver for modernisation rather than an obstacle. The CIO has become a close ally, and the institution's move to Drupal is now happening with renewed urgency. Rogue WordPress sites and a standalone HTML-only registrarial website (with no analytics and no maintainer) are explicitly flagged as targets for consolidation.
Ian notes that a brand refresh completed two years before the crisis — designed in-house, built for multiple business processes (not just marketing), and developed collaboratively with the broader community — has seen adoption increase during the resource crunch because departments that have lost staff are now coming to the central brand team for help rather than starting from scratch.
Governance is a recurring theme. The team is introducing stricter editorial governance for the new Drupal site while allowing limited faculty spaces for student blogs. A notably candid moment involves the homepage slider: despite strong political pressure from multiple stakeholders to keep it, Nicole and Ian are using user research data and support from a decisive incoming president to remove it. An audience question about UX research reveals that Evolving Web has conducted stakeholder surveys, workshops, end-user journey mapping interviews, tree testing for the information architecture, and heuristic/analytics reviews — all used as evidence to override stakeholder preferences with user data. The team also has an embedded market research group within marketing that provides ongoing audience segmentation and program demand research, preventing one-off anecdotal opinions from driving decisions.
Key Takeaways
- •Lead every inbound request with probing questions before scoping: 'just a web page' often reveals an under-resourced project or a strategic gap that needs enterprise planning.
- •Move the central team from a ticket-taking model to a strategic advisory model — solve five to ten similar problems at once with self-serve templates rather than fulfilling one-off requests.
- •Ground every contested stakeholder decision in user data tied to the primary audience (e.g. prospective students), not internal staff preferences or anecdotal personal experience.
- •Use pilot programs, phased roadmaps, and explicit parking lots to satisfy stakeholder desire for newness without destabilising core delivery — the cyclical academic calendar helps set realistic timelines.
- •Build brand systems collaboratively across departments and for multiple business processes, not just marketing goals; adoption increases sharply when teams lose resources and need ready-made assets.
- •Form tight alliances with the CIO and senior leadership early — consolidating onto a shared, open-source CMS requires executive backing and becomes easier to justify during a resource crisis.
- •Invest in an embedded, ongoing market research capability rather than relying on project-by-project UX research; this turns data-driven decisions into a cultural norm rather than a one-time argument.
- •Capture leadership statements about digital strategy opportunistically (e.g. a pre-recorded media training session) and use them as internal advocacy material with resistant stakeholders.
- •Kill rogue departmental websites aggressively — unmaintained HTML-only sites with no analytics create SEO damage and business continuity risk even when they seem harmless.
- •Stricter governance post-migration should be reinforced from the top: a decisive president willing to back content and design decisions based on user research rather than politics is a key enabler.
Transcript
Uh, hi all. I'm Jesse. I am a associate PMO at the web. But before that, I spent 10 years in higher ed in what I believe the polite term for would be a rogue department. You all know what those are, right? Like you love what you do centrally. It sounds great. We're special, right? Uh, and it wasn't until later in the game and especially after I left that I realized we were probably hurting ourselves as much as each other. And that's sort of really why I wanted to bring Ian and Nicole here to tal...
