Our Core Topics

While generally prescriptive, we ALWAYS adjust to ensure that we align with your organizational goals and culture.

TEAM ENGAGEMENT (People)

Your team is your greatest resource and your biggest investment. Our job will be to make sure they are aligned and engaged so productivity and job satisfaction are optimized.

• Team Protocols
  Learn how to accelerate through Forming, Storming & Norming and get to the Performing by quickly aligning on: objectives, roles & responsibilities, documentation, planning and more. We’ll start with an assessment of your current state, and together form a plan to get to a target future state.
  
  
• Communication & Lens Agility
  We don’t subscribe to any one school of thought on communication. Key focus areas include empathetic listening, assertive sharing of ideas, respectful challenging, radical candor, and getting the full team to an ‘all-in’ level of engagement. Lens agility is about being able to get out of your own paradigm and look at situations from other perspectives. Those who master lens agility will not only foster collaboration but will out-innovate those who don’t master this skill.
  
  
• Prioritization
  When we take on too many tasks and projects, the result is decreased productivity and/or working too many hours. This is not a formula for sustainable success. We’ll cover individual, team, and organizational approaches to mitigate this challenge.
  • Individual Task Management:  We’ll cover personal accountability methods to reset expectations. These are simple and can be tool independent.   
  • Team / Corporate Priorities:
    There are many simple methods to prioritize projects and focus. We’ll share several and apply them to some of your task/project lists for some actionable and transparent change.    
    
    
• Stop the Meetings Hate!
  How much time (and money) is wasted each week in unproductive meetings?   This workshop is targeted to those leading and facilitating meetings across the organization. We’ll cover simple and effective techniques and tactics to elevate the ROI of all your meetings. Our mantra for meetings is  ‘Debate, Decide & Commit”.
  
  
• Collaboration Culture Reset
  For broad initiatives, larger group sessions will provide transparency, clarity and ultimately adoption of changes. These can be at multiple strategic points in an engagement.

PROCESS MAPPING (Process)

We’ve developed a simplified, proprietary approach to process mapping called SMapping®. This method is collaborative and does not require significant training or expensive tools to master. It results in a standardized method to document processes across your organization to greatly elevate transparency, understanding, continuous improvement and adoption.

• SMapping 101
  Small groups will learn how to collaboratively map a business process.  This is an interactive session!  We’ll also look at some digitized SMaps to understand the end result and discuss how they can be shared across your organization.
  
  
• SMapping Facilitation
  Small groups (5 max) will learn the art and science of facilitating SMap sessions. Our goal is to enable organizations to independently leverage these techniques and skills to ensure sustainable success.
  
  
• SMap Digitization
  Participants will learn how to translate images captured at SMap sessions into PowerPoint templates. We’ll use an iterative approach to collaboratively arrive at maps that effectively convey the target process for all stakeholders and sets us up for agile process improvement. We’ll discuss a governance plan to ensure this becomes a business process not just a one-time project.
  
  
• SMaps & Work Instruction Alignment
  SMaps can stand alone for high-level process transparency, but they can also partner well with work instructions. We have templates that combine SMaps and work instructions that have received high marks from ISO auditors! In this workshop we’ll determine an optimal approach for your organization that balances usability, governance and effectiveness.
  
  
• Launch a SMap Initiative
  When a company needs to set or reset processes across the organization, we will partner with you to plan and execute this effort. We’ll ensure document governance, ownership and continuous improvement are addressed in addition to effective process documentation.

DIGITAL COLLABORATION (Tools)

Our focus is on tactics and tips for collaboration using Microsoft tools including:  Office365 suite, SharePoint, Teams and Dynamics CRM/Customer Engagement. Too often organizations make the investment in technology, and assume the adoption and ROI will just come automatically from the tool. Users get comfortable with a ‘get it done’ skill level, and don’t take the time to get truly efficient and effective. We’ll help your team transition from working harder to working smarter.  

• Leveraging Office 365 Together
  Microsoft’s Office 365 enables a whole new way to work collaboratively with file organization and sharing, co-authoring, OneNote shared notebooks, and more. We’ll also touch on leveraging Outlook for time and task management. Focus of this session is on individual tactics for efficiency.
  
  
• Office 365 Workshop
  All too often there’s a gap between the tools provided by IT and the engagement of users to leverage these tools. We’ll work with you to identify challenges in your organization to set an agenda to address specific scenarios and challenges.
  
  
• Microsoft Teams for Teamwork
  Teams is the fastest growing Microsoft product, ever!  Teams is so much more than virtual meetings and IM chats. This session can be customer designed for teams and/or team owners to better understand the possibilities and protocols to collaborate effectively using Teams.
  
  
• CRM: Reset to ROI
  Together we have decades of experience with Dynamics CRM in various industries. While we could assist in an implementation project, we excel at helping you evaluate your current configuration, processes and adoption and develop a road map to elevate adoption, meaningful metrics and sales. We collaborate with your technical team (internal and/or external) to gain alignment with the business needs.  
  
  

NOTE: We choose to be Microsoft tool centric to cut through the noise. Our concepts and methods will apply to many tools. However, thoughtful standardization of tools with effective guidelines for their use will foster collaboration.