Public Service - Higher Education Management Consulting Manager

Accenture helps the world's leading enterprises reinvent by building their digital core and unleashing the power of AI to create value at speed for organizations across industries. Our strategy is to be the reinvention partner of choice for our clients and lead in the safe, widespread adoption of AI, and to be the most client-focused, AI-enabled, great place to work in the world. We bring together the talent of our approximately 799,000 people with proprietary assets and platforms, deep process and industry expertise, and leading ecosystem relationships to deliver end-to-end solutions and measurable outcomes at scale. Through our Reinvention Services, we offer broad expertise across Cybersecurity, Digital Core, Finance, Industry and Enterprise, Song, Supply Chain and Engineering, and Talent, with advanced capabilities in AI and Data, Industry and Process, and Technology. We serve approximately 9,000 clients and generated approximately $70 billion in FY25 revenue. Visit us at accenture.com.

ABOUT THE PRACTICE

Higher education is in the middle of one of the most significant operational transformations it has seen in decades. Institutions are rethinking how they manage finance, HR, payroll, procurement, and research administration, moving away from legacy systems and fragmented processes toward integrated platforms that can support the pace and complexity of a modern university or college.

The stakes are real. These are not back-office projects. They touch every faculty member, every department administrator, every researcher managing a grant, every employee waiting on a paycheck. Done well, they unlock institutional capacity that was previously buried in manual processes and disconnected systems. Done poorly, they create disruption that takes years to recover from.

Our Higher Education practice is in the middle of this transformation, working with universities, four-year colleges, and community colleges on the implementations that matter most to them. We are looking for practitioners who find this work genuinely compelling and bring the domain depth to do it well.

THE WORK

You will own the functional tower in your domain, whether Finance, HR, Payroll, Procurement, or Research Administration, on Cloud ERP implementations for college and university clients. That means leading design, driving decisions, managing the client relationships within your workstream, and being accountable for the quality of what gets delivered.

Higher education is not a simpler version of corporate or government ERP work; it is fundamentally different. Finance functions are decentralized across colleges, departments, and research units. HR operates in a shared governance environment where faculty have a voice in institutional decisions. Payroll spans multiple bargaining units with distinct contracts and pay rules. Procurement intersects with sponsored programs in ways that create unique compliance obligations. For research universities, the sponsored research enterprise, including effort reporting, indirect cost recovery, sub-award management, and cost transfers, adds a layer of complexity that has to be designed for from the start, not discovered later.

What makes a practitioner effective in this environment is not just platform knowledge. It is understanding how universities actually make decisions, how change lands in a shared governance culture, and how the design choices made in one tower affect operations across the institution for years. We are not looking for someone who covers every domain; we are looking for someone who owns one and brings that depth to every room they walk into.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Lead the functional tower in your domain, whether Finance, HR, Payroll, Procurement, or Research Administration, on Cloud ERP implementations for universities, four-year colleges, and community colleges.
• Own design decisions within your tower, drawing on both platform capability and a real understanding of how higher education institutions operate, including the decentralized structures, shared governance dynamics, and cross-functional dependencies that shape every design choice.
• Build and maintain strong working relationships with client functional leaders in your domain, such as VPs of Finance, Controllers, HR Directors, Payroll Directors, Chief Procurement Officers, Sponsored Programs Directors, or Grants Managers, and engage with them as a peer who understands their world.
• Lead stakeholder engagement and change management within your tower, recognizing that adoption in higher education requires navigating shared governance, decentralized departmental cultures, and stakeholders who will scrutinize every design decision.
• Navigate integration complexity by understanding how your tower connects to other enterprise systems, student platforms, research administration systems, and state or federal reporting environments, and by designing with those dependencies in mind.
• Apply AI-assisted analysis, workflow design, and delivery acceleration as part of how you work day to day, not as an add-on but as a standard method that improves quality and speed.
• Communicate clearly on status, risk, and decisions to senior stakeholders, including awareness of how implementation milestones interact with board reporting cycles and audit timelines.
• Contribute to proposals and pursuits by bringing domain credibility that resonates with higher education evaluators who are looking for practitioners that understand their institution, not just their software.

Travel: Ability to travel 50%+.