Designing Low-Risk Tech Experiments That Make 'No' as Valuable as 'Yes'

Higher education IT teams are caught in a familiar trap. Leadership wants innovation, but budgets are frozen and the cost of failure feels too risky. The result? Teams play it safe, tool adoption stalls, workarounds proliferate, and student and staff needs go unmet. This poster uses our institution's Canva Pro campus pilot as a live case study in structured, low-risk technology evaluation. I'll share how a small IT team navigated a pilot with a loose framework, adapted to staff turnover, and what we learned when it came time to justify the cost without pre-defined success metrics. The goal wasn't a perfect pilot but to find out if Canva Pro was a good fit for our community, and waiting for the perfect framework is just another way of never starting. Attendees will walk away with the confidence to take risks, start before the framework is perfect, adapt to change, and build their evaluation process along the way.