services

What is the spark that will ignite the growth you know is possible in your organization?  As the momentum builds, can your infrastructure support it?  At Spark VSEM, we provide a variety of services focused on building your business on a solid foundation, so the future is limitless!  

Aren't sure what you need?  Use the Contact Us section below to get started.

The difference between change handled well and change handled poorly in an organization can be costly - in both tangible financial impact and mental load on your team.  It can also lead to inefficiency and loss of great staff.  With Organizational Change Management and LEAN certified efficiency expertise, we can help you ensure important changes in our organization are handled effectively – including helping your leaders learn to guide their people through successful adoption in the future.

Here are some changes in your organization that will benefit from formal Change Management  support: Merger and acquisition announcements, software implementations, organizational restructuring,  return to office decisions, changing vendors, implementing offshore resourcing, and many more.

Our workshops have the “teach them to fish” mentality by bringing our expertise in-house to your existing team, building internal experts within your own organization on a variety of topics.

Sparking Growth: Igniting Your Vision Through Strategy Alignment -  When everyone isn’t rowing in the same direction, we end up going in circles. Development and deployment of long-term strategy that ensures a shared vision is key but can be difficult if you’ve never done it before. In this workshop, we will:

• Review (or establish) Mission, Vision, and Values for your organization.
• Develop a three to five-year plan, aligning all areas of your organization to the shared vision.
• Create measurement tools and either SMART  Goals or Objectives and Key Results (OKR's), and assign roles within the organization for tracking to the plan over time.
• Provide training and tools for ensuring each role stays on track.

Sparking Performance: Building High-Performing Teams* - How do you make sure that what people are focusing on aligns to your vision? How do you consistently and fairly understand their results? To ensure everyone is rowing in the same direction, this workshop focuses on teaching leaders to build performance plans and measurement methods that will:

• Tie success to the company’s vision and strategy, showing each employee how they make a difference in the company’s success through participation in goals or OKR's.
• Determine methods for measuring performance for various objectives, based on the tools you already use.
• Demonstrate various methods for consistent, timely feedback that make “review time” less stressful by taking away uncomfortable surprises.
• Create growth and development plans for employees that tie to the company’s long-term strategy, helping you grow and retain your best talent.

*This workshop is typically delivered as a follow-up to the Spark Growth workshop, but can be delivered independently in organizations with a clearly defined long-term strategy.

Sparking Change: Empowering Leaders of Positive Change - Making change isn’t easy, and our biggest roadblock isn’t knowing what needs to change, it’s getting our people on board. This workshop teaches change management, including: 

• Understanding how people relate to change and why change often goes nowhere.
• Analyzing what your change culture has been and how to get it on track, if needed.
• Teaching your team how to tell when people are struggling with change, and what to do about it.
• Helping leaders understand how to implement change correctly to minimize change resistance, including tools, plans, and templates.

Sparking Efficiency: Unleashing Efficiency Superpowers - With LEAN Six Sigma methodologies as a foundation, this workshop focuses on several topics to prepare your leaders to build effective, efficient processes:

• Using resources effectively – building a sourcing plan that outlines which roles do which work so that each resource is used to its fullest capabilities.
• Creating workflow maps and role diagrams to better understand how work items move through your organization.
• Building processes with metrics in mind to track flow, productivity, and quality.
• Building for quality – Ensuring processes have built in quality checks, E&O protections, and DOI compliance. 
• Root cause analysis – how to understand why quality or efficiency problems are happening so they can be corrected.
• Using SOP’s effectively, with versioning, feedback tracking, and employee engagement reporting. 

Every business is different, and so how a Fractional Chief Operating Officer, Chief Strategy Officer, or Chief of Staff can make an impact in your specific business will be fleshed out as part of our initial discussions.  Typically, though, as a part-time to full-time resource, these roles act within an organization overseeing strategy development, implementation, and managing the operational aspects of the business.  

Most importantly, these roles are responsible for ensuring a long-term growth strategy exists and is being implemented within the organization across all functions.  This includes establishing goals and metrics for performance, and tracking those to plan, typically to be reported with a monthly or quarterly cadence.

Functions that might typically be managed:  Operations and service functions, Human Resources, project management, training, legal and compliance, facilities, sales operations, marketing, administration roles, vendor management, and where other C level leaders do not exist, this role can include IT and Finance & Accounting.  

From looking for process efficiencies to implementing a new payroll vendor, we can provide project planning and implementation oversight. With LEAN certified efficiency expertise and specialization in organizational change management, we can help you ensure important changes in our organization are handled effectively – including helping your leaders learn to guide their people through successful adoption. 

Here are some projects that might fall under this category: Merger and acquisition analysis, growth strategy and planning, budget creation with projection modeling, vendor selection, software implementation, SOP tools and software, review of specific workflows for efficiency improvement, employee onboarding process development, and change management & communication planning.

 Just need a sounding board from time to time? Have vendor negotiations you need help with, or getting stuck building meaningful reporting? With a minimum monthly commitment, we can provide ad-hoc help as needed.