Background

As part of my education, my team and I had the opportunity to collaborate with Halmstad University’s administrative support department to help optimize the support provided to managers and leadership. At Halmstad University, leadership spans several layers. From academic managers and department managers to the university director and central support units. All these roles depend heavily on internal support: HR, finance, IT, communication, recruitment, legal guidance, and more.

But despite the complexity of this ecosystem, no one had ever mapped out how this support was actually experienced.

There was no shared understanding of:
- Whether the support was sufficient
- How accessible it was
- Where responsibilities overlapped
- What created friction in daily work

Our mission was to change that.
‍
As a team of service design students, we were tasked with uncovering what support leaders truly need and how the university can build a more effective, human-centered support system.

Organizational chart

My role

As the project lead, I was responsible for steering the overall process and keeping the team aligned from brief to final delivery. I coordinated planning, facilitated collaboration with our client at Halmstad University, and made sure our research insights translated into clear, actionable service design directions.

As project lead, I also took ownership of structuring the material into a coherent story that our stakeholders could act on.

The challenge

Support existed, but it wasn’t coordinated, consistent, or easy to navigate.

Leaders described their experience with words like:
‍"I have no idea who is responsible for what."
"I have to know the intranet by heart to find anything."
"IT support is faster in the hallway than in the HelpDesk system."
"Sometimes decisions are made without involving us."

‍These insights revealed a deeper issue:
A fragmented ecosystem where leaders lacked clarity, predictability, and the right kind of support at the right time.

The central question became:

How might we create a more accessible, predictable and supportive environment for university leaders, one that strengthens their ability to lead effectively and sustainably?

Desktop research

We began by mapping the entire support system. From roles, responsibilities, guidelines, and how other universities structured similar support systems.

This initial work revealed something important:
The support wasn’t the problem, the way it was organized, communicated and accessed was.

Support mapping for all leadership and management roles

Support mapping for department Managers

This support mapping shows how support functions were distributed across different leadership levels. This really helped us to understand what support every role was supposed to get.

Field Observations

To move beyond assumptions, I led the team through four full-day observations with leaders in different roles.

What we saw was consistent across the board:
- Constant context switching
- Fragmented tools
- Unclear flows for decision-making
- Stress caused by disjointed systems
- Reliance on tacit knowledge rather than documented processes.

These observations gave us the first glimpse of a deeper truth:
Leaders weren’t lacking competence, they were lacking clarity.

Pictures from the observations

Semi-Structured Interviews (16 leaders)

The interviews confirmed and deepened our insights. Leaders generously shared frustrations, hopes and values. Often with remarkable honesty.

Some quotes that shaped our direction:
"If I can’t find the information, I just ask someone who’s been here longer."
"Support is quick when someone sits near me, but it´s slow when it goes through the system."
"We work in silos. They don’t see our reality."
"I shouldn’t need to guess who’s responsible."

The recurring themes were work tasks, everyday support, needs and improvements.

As project lead, I coordinated the interviews, ensured consistency in the guides, and made sure every insight was traceable and validated.

One of the thematic analysis, overview maps

This was done for all roles. The picture is an example and shows a summary/overview of our insights from the interviews with the academic managers. It includes the negative and positive aspects they mentioned about the support, their systems, clarity, and well-being. We extracted important quotes and statements that helped us understand their opinions and frustrations.

Survey, quantitative validation

To ensure we weren’t designing based solely on isolated insights we validated our themes through two targeted surveys. One for the people working in the academy and one for the central support managers.

The result was clear and gave us the confidence to prioritize what mattered most.

Summary of satisfaction statistics

Personas & Journey Maps

To make the complexity tangible, I synthesized the data into two personas, several critical journey maps and a value propostion canvas for the roles.

These visualizations revealed recurring patterns:
- Confusion around where to start
- Duplicated work across systems
- High emotional load in HR-related tasks
- Lack of transparency in support processes
- Heavy dependency on colleagues for “unwritten rules.”

Even though the journey maps helped us understand specific journeys, such as service planning and recruitment, we quickly realized that we had narrowed our perspective far too much, which became a real eye-opener. We then had to take a step back to regain an understanding of the bigger picture. Here, the maps we created from the interviews were very valuable and helped us move forward with a service design strategy that supported the optimisation of the support system as a whole and not just one journey.

One of our personas representing the academic managers

One of the journeys we mapped, recruitment process

The journey mapping were very detailed. It showed every step in the process, thoughts, feelings, challenges, support, and insights.

Value proposition canvas for the academic managers

Key insights after working through all the material