Reimagining Professional Services at a Higher Education Institution

The Challenge

A university’s Professional Services (PS) team were facing significant pressure. Rapid growth forecasts (including a 25% increase in student numbers within five years), coupled with rising operational costs and sector-wide financial challenges meant that existing ways of working were no longer sustainable.

Recent restructures and voluntary severance schemes had left many areas experiencing change fatigue, uncertainty, and frustration, with a sense that the value of Professional Services was not fully understood or supported. Morale was fragile, and teams were struggling to balance delivery of day-to-day operations with the need to rethink how services should function going forward. Leaders recognised the need to reimagine Professional Services to become more collaborative, robust, efficient and better aligned to the evolving needs of students and the university as a whole, but lacked the space and support to tackle this collectively.

Our Approach

The Good Change partnered with the university’s leadership team to design and deliver a bespoke workshop as part of the Professional Services Away Day, focused on reconnecting leaders with purpose and giving them the clarity, confidence and structure to shape change together.

Our facilitation approach created the conditions for:

• Inclusive participation, making sure every voice was heard regardless of hierarchy
• Real-time strategic reflection, lifting teams out of firefighting mode into shared problem solving
• Collaborative exercises, including the Sailboat framework to explore vision (“the island”), barriers (“anchors”), risks (“icebergs”) and strengths (“the wind”)
• Service design methods, to identify broken or over-complex processes, clarify user needs and reveal opportunities for simplification and collaboration
• Fully interactive design, avoiding PowerPoint delivery in favour of small-group work, paired reflection and facilitated plenary discussion
• Clear follow-through, including insight synthesis and recommendations to convert conversation into action

The Outcomes

The away day became a powerful catalyst for change, delivering immediate and long-term impact:

• Open, psychologically safe conversations, allowing leaders to surface frustrations, challenges and concerns honestly without blame
• Clarity of direction Leaders co-created a clear shared vision for Professional Services, aligned around empowered teams, stronger leadership, streamlined processes, faster decisions and joined-up service delivery.
• Honest diagnosis Root causes of stalled progress were surfaced, including siloed working, unclear ownership, administrative overload and fragmented processes, shifting focus from symptoms to solutions.
• Action, not talk Priority workstreams were identified, governance clarified, collaboration strengthened and early automation plans developed, all owned by the leadership team themselves.
• Renewed energy Leaders felt heard, valued and re-energised, with renewed pride in their role supporting student success.

Rather than being a standalone event, the away day became the starting point for deeper transformation work. The Good Change was invited to support the university with a Service Design Coaching programme, to take the insight from the workshop into delivery.

This next phase included:

• Supporting the design and delivery of customer and staff workshops to explore pain points
• Facilitating pre- and post-award service design sessions
• Helping to synthesise findings into recommendations and reports
• Providing ongoing implementation support, governance input and coaching for internal leaders
• Maintaining weekly check-ins to track progress and unblock issues during delivery 

This continued partnership ensured the shift from clarity to execution, embedding service design capability and sustaining change beyond the initial intervention. It demonstrated how the right workshop, at the right moment, can unlock not just insight, but real organisational change.

When leaders align around the right conversation, momentum follows and transformation becomes possible.