How UC Irvine's Charlie Dunlop School of Biological Sciences Used Pigment During a Shared Services Transition

6 min read

Centralizing into shared services changed how people worked together before it changed anything else. This is how the Dunlop School used a common language for working styles to carry seventeen leaders through that transition, and what they would tell another team weighing the same move.

About the Dunlop School

The Dunlop School is one of the academic schools at the University of California, Irvine. It serves students, faculty, and staff, and it has grown from four departments to five. That growth, together with real resource constraints across the university, raised a practical question about how to do the school’s administrative work differently.

The answer was shared services. The Dunlop School became the first school at UC Irvine to centralize its administrative work into a shared services model, moving functions such as finance, HR, purchasing, graduate advising, and contracts and grants administration out of individual departments.

The Challenge

Centralizing changed how people worked together. Colleagues who had collaborated across departments before were now in much closer, more interdependent collaboration than the previous structure had required, and the new model asked them to work differently together than they had in the past. At that new level of interdependence, they did not yet share an understanding of how each other worked, communicated, or approached problems.

The school was also charting new ground. As the first school at UC Irvine to attempt this model, its leadership was writing the playbook as they went. And they understood the environment they were working in. Higher education runs on consensus and earned trust, and change involves real considerations like unions and classification structures. As the team puts it, you can’t simply announce a change and expect compliance. They knew the new model would succeed through genuine buy-in, and that meant helping seventeen directors and managers build the closer, more interdependent working relationships the new structure now asked of them.

The school was already investing in its people. An executive coach worked with specific individuals, and one team had used a DISC assessment. But those were designed for individuals and single teams. This moment called for something the entire leadership group could share at the same time.

Why They Added Pigment

A member of the school’s leadership team took Pigment on his own and found that the report captured how he worked with striking accuracy. He shared it with his leadership, and the group quickly recognized how directly it answered the need the transition had created.

Pigment gives people a clear, shared way to see their own strengths and understand how they work best, and it could reach the entire leadership group at once. The Dunlop School built it into the change itself. The goal was concrete: give seventeen people a common language for how each of them operates, so the everyday friction of a new structure could be understood as a matter of working style and process, and worked through with that understanding.

What Worked

A few things stood out as especially effective for the leadership group, and they would carry over well to any unit facing a similar change.

Leadership went first

Before anyone else was asked to take the assessment, Randy Bautista presented his own results to the school’s leadership group, walking through parts of his report and sharing his trading card. Seeing a real example, from someone they knew, did more to explain the value than a description could have. It set a tone of openness that made others comfortable taking part. With that buy-in, the Dunlop School purchased assessments for all 17 directors and managers running shared services day to day, and set a deadline for completion.

Trading cards, not full reports

The Dunlop School asked everyone to share their Pigment trading card while keeping their full report private. The card, the quick-snapshot version of the results, shows a person’s working style, strengths, and energy at a glance. That gave the group real insight into how each colleague operates while protecting what feels personal, and that balance is a big part of why people engaged so openly.

Pairing people from different units

At a leadership meeting, the team deliberately paired directors and managers from different units, colleagues who now work together far more closely than the old structure required, then gave each pair a few guided questions: What stood out to you about your results? What would you want people to know before working with you on a project? Pairs shared what they learned with the full group. Those conversations built understanding among exactly the people the new model asks to rely on one another.

A shared view of the whole group

Using the group’s trading cards, the team built an internal dashboard of working styles across leadership, showing the distribution of styles, common strengths, energy patterns, and side-by-side pairings between directors. It gave everyone one place to see how the group operates as a whole. The leadership team turned out to skew operational, which fits a group responsible for the school’s administrative work, and the pairings view became a natural conversation starter on its own.

Early Outcomes

It is early, and the Dunlop School is clear that the fuller picture will take time. What is already unmistakable is the change in how people talk to each other. The working styles have become part of everyday vocabulary. A colleague is described as an accelerator or a harmonizer, and the room immediately understands something real about how that person thinks and how to work with them well.

The shared language lets people understand each other well beyond personality, and that understanding builds empathy and trust. It becomes safer to name how you actually work. Someone who needs a moment to think before speaking can say so, and the colleague waiting on an answer understands the pause as focus. As that understanding spreads, people start to recognize each other’s strengths and help one another lean into the work that fits them best. The paired conversations carry this further, steadily shaping the culture the new model depends on.

None of this needed a mandate. The leadership group’s own momentum carried it, and directors asked to bring Pigment to their teams before anyone proposed it. On that strength, the Dunlop School is extending it to all administrative staff as a professional development investment, with each unit moving at its own pace. A tool the school reached for to get through a hard transition is becoming part of how it works together.

People are now collaborating across admin units in ways they weren’t before, and they didn’t necessarily have a shared understanding of how each other works, communicates, or approaches problems. Pigment gives us a low-stakes way to build that understanding. It’s a change management tool for us, and something to help our staff see their own strengths, understand what energizes them, and develop a shared language for working across units that didn’t previously overlap.

— Randy Bautista, Strategic Initiatives Lead, The Charlie Dunlop School of Biological Sciences, University of California, Irvine

Advice from the Dunlop School Team

For other schools and departments weighing the same move, here is what the Dunlop School would pass along.

• Go first yourself. The fastest way to make the assessment feel safe is to lead with your own results. When the group saw a real example from someone they knew, interest turned genuine and people opted in without hesitation.
• Share trading cards, not full reports. Have everyone share a trading card and keep their full report private. The card shows how a person works at a glance, and that small choice is what made the whole group comfortable opening up.
• Pair people from different units. Put colleagues together, especially those the new structure now asks to work closely. The most valuable conversations came from directors and managers who had not collaborated this closely before, and a single guided discussion was enough to turn two names on a roster into colleagues who knew how to work together.
• Let each team adopt it at its own pace. Set a deadline for leadership, then let every other team come to it on their own timeline. In a culture built on trust, giving people that choice is what earns their buy-in, and they meet that trust in kind.