The final team leaders are now in place – and ready for the next step

Update on the appointments

We have now appointed all team leaders in Planning, marking an important step in the transition of the study administration.

Last week, Maria Garfield Grønbjerg Jørgensen and Britta Løck Worm from SAMF were appointed as acting team leaders for SAMF Planning and EVU Planning respectively.

This week, Søren Sten Hansen follows as acting team leader for NAT Planning and Marlene Østergaard as acting team leader for HUM Planning. Finally, Helle Gad has been appointed acting team leader for TEK Planning and Danny Colmorten for SUND Planning.

Read a few lines about them below. I'm very much looking forward to welcoming them and working with them all – it's a strong team.

They will play a key role in linking strategy to practice and ensuring that we make good progress in the process. The team leaders will help to finalise the last interfaces and task assignments.

Many of you will find that tasks will move so that policy tasks remain at the faculties, while operational tasks are gathered in SDU Education. This requires close collaboration and flexibility, and this is where team leaders are crucial.

Team leaders will also play an important role in planning the transition phase from 1 January to 31 March. Here we need to ensure clear responsibilities and good working relationships to ensure the administration of examinations in January runs smoothly.

Building on what works

The faculties have already done a lot of work to develop and digitise different parts of the processes. This work must continue in Planning, and the best solutions must be rolled out to all teams. We need to think holistically and from an SDU perspective – just as we see in the campus cities, where the degree programme secretaries in SDU Education solve the operational tasks of planning and running teaching and exams with great loyalty to the programmes.

As Maria Guldberg, degree programme secretary at SDU Education in Kolding, says

– Even though we are in SDU Education, we still have a close and local connection to our heads of studies and lecturers. It means a lot to me to maintain the professional and collegial closeness on a day-to-day basis, while at the same time raising our sights and collaborating across campus cities and faculties to find the solutions that work best in practice. I would like to use my experience to help ensure a good and smooth start to the new organisation, where my student secretary colleagues will be based at SDU Education in Odense rather than at the faculties.

What happens next?

In the coming weeks, the steering committee, together with the acting team leaders, will continue to work on clarifying the final interfaces and organising the transition phase leading up to the turn of the year. You can follow the progress here on the OSU project page.

The position of Head of Planning is expected to be posted on 31 October.

New team leaders for NAT, HUM and TEK Planning

Søren Sten Hansen will be acting head of NAT Planning. He has been at SDU since 2005 and is currently team leader for programme administration at NAT. Søren has experience with planning, digital support for teaching and exams, and IT system operations. In his new role, he will ensure stability in the team's tasks, strengthen the collaboration between SDU Education and NAT Education at the faculty and create a solid foundation for the development of NAT Planning. He will also introduce the future permanent team leader before he returns to the faculty.

Marlene Østergaard will be acting head of HUM Planning. Marlene has been employed at SDU since 2004, when she started in the Rector's Office. Since then, she has worked at the Department of Philosophy, Education and Religious Studies and in the degree programme secretarial office under HUM with a focus on staff and study administration. For many years, she has been an active part of the HK union network at SDU and is currently union representative for HK employees in the humanities. Through this, she has built up a broad network and extensive knowledge of SDU across the organisation – experiences she will bring into play in Planning with a focus on collaboration, well-being and common direction.

Helle Gad will be employed directly as team leader for TEK Planning and will start on 1 January 2026. Helle has been at SDU since 2001, first at HUM and then SUND, while she has been at the Faculty of Engineering for the past 10 years. Since 2020, she has been head of the Education Coordination and Support department with responsibility for personnel and professional management for the group of degree programme secretaries and education coordinators. She has a good insight into the team's tasks and a good understanding of the needs of engineering programmes, and she has helped drive administrative development at TEK. She will be a very strong link between TEK and TEK Planning in the future.

Danny Colmorten becomes acting head of SUND Planning. Danny is team coordinator for timetable planning and exams at SUND across the faculty administration and departmental secretarial offices. He has experience with process optimisation and information sharing and is a super user of the digital systems used in teaching, timetable planning and exams. Danny has been employed at SDU for a number of years and has also worked at both SAMF and TEK.