Future Education at KTH boosts its programme organisation

Anna Jerbrant, new Programme Manager from 1 November 2024, comments on the latest programme organisation and plans for the spring. The new organisation will enable the programme to manage the extensive project portfolio and change initiatives in a more structured way supporting KTH's long-term visions and goals.
Just before Christmas 2024, the President Anders Söderholm signed the decision to strengthen the Future Education programme organisation. Since Anna Jerbrant (ITM) was appointed programme manager for the change programme Future Education at KTH, an important task has been to develop proposals for a new organisation and anchor them in the programme's steering group and KTH's faculty council.
New challenges and expanded mission
Amid a growing project portfolio and new remits, there is an increasing need for better representation and structure to manage the remits. As a consequence, the programme management will have representation from all schools in addition to a reference group from the University Administration will be established and principle coordinators will be appointed.
Since its establishment, more than 50 development projects that, in various ways, affect all five schools at KTH have been initiated within the Future Education programme.
"From the outset, President Ander Söderholm expressed the ambition for the projects to be scalable outside the department or school. We have seen that this places completely different demands on governance and project methodology - hence the strengthening of the programme organisation," says Anna Jerbrant.
With two new programme managers, there is a role distribution between the programme managers; Joakim Lilliesköld (EECS) and Gunnar Tibert (SCI) become deputy programme managers. The new assistant programme managers, Mats Nilsson (CBH) and Daniel Koch (ABE) will have more responsibility over certain parts of the project portfolio.
"We are pleased to have representatives from all schools on the programme management team while bringing in people with complementary experiences and competencies," Jerbrant says.
In addition, 13 principle coordinators will be appointed, mainly from those already involved in the programme organisation, who will be responsible for a given principle to ensure a more explicit focus on progress within the principle and knowledge sharing.
"We need better coordination of initiatives and activities that are ongoing in the development projects – so it was natural to organise based on the structure offered by the framework, " Anna adds.
Plans for the spring
In a changing world, plans can change quickly. But current plans for the programme management is to appoint principle coordinators, onboard new colleagues to the programme organisation, run the podcast "Fika chat on the future of education", continue to support ongoing development projects and initiate the process for a new batch of school projects in 2025. Furthermore, they will continue to work on external benchmarking and exchange with other universities (mainly Chalmers and NTNU) and increase cooperation with, for example, FEEAF*.
"In addition, we have recently been commissioned to lead the development of a draft policy decision for KTH's learning environments. The decision includes both physical and digital learning environments and affects many different functions at KTH," says Anna Jerbrant.
*Future Education External Advisory Forum
Text: Sofie Kim