How we'll work together and what we do.

Training and education are always an important part of building a continuous improvement system and culture.  Our approach is to match all training with application to some area of the business.  We do this using the highly effective Learn – Apply – Reflect model of adult learning. With this framework in mind, our training combines classroom instruction with hands-on simulation and reflection to reinforce learning.  The training is usually paired with real-world applications to help build practical understanding and confidence in the content for each individual.  This is particularly important due to the recent rise in preference for online courses.    

Learn - Through the use of a combination of text readings and online/in-person classroom learning, individuals are presented with highly effective concepts, tools, and methods.

Apply - Via both hands-on classroom simulations and work on actual processes and problems in your business, individuals apply what they’ve learned in a controlled, facilitated manner.  This allows them to put actions into words, giving them experiences that drive new thinking, skills, and beliefs.

Reflect - Facilitated reflection, both individually and within groups, reinforces what they’ve learned and applied.

Addressing business challenges often requires bringing together cross-functional teams, often with strong personalities, to tackle problems, develop strategies, or plot a new course.  Well-defined agendas and effective facilitation of these meetings and workshops can often be the difference between successful outcomes or just more churn and division between groups.  

Engaging an independent facilitator allows you to focus on the meeting content rather than managing the meeting, dealing with the personalities, and ensuring that everyone contributes while no one dominates.  Our team has planned and facilitated dozens of critical meetings and workshops, the types and topics of the events we’ve facilitated are too numerous to list here. Free yourself from the burden of planning and running the next critical meeting/workshop and let us help you get the most out of these events.

One of the most critical aspects of any continuous improvement effort is to help individuals challenge their current paradigms and behaviors.  After all, current paradigms and behaviors are why you are where you are today.  To learn new paradigms and behaviors, individuals must suspend their current beliefs and paradigms so they can test new ones.  While simulation based training helps larger groups test new paradigms, individual and small group coaching is highly effective in helping people overcome past paradigms and behaviors that are unique to them.

We’ve experienced the same shifts in paradigms and beliefs during our careers in industry that you will likely experience.  We can identify and help guide your people through these shifts in paradigms and beliefs.  Beliefs drive Actions, and Actions drive Results.  We must work to change beliefs to enable new results.

As part of their values or mission statements, most companies include some sort of statement about valuing customers,  having customer focus, etc.  In reality, very few have methods, tools, metrics, and analytics to help them successfully achieve their statements.   Most rely on information passed from person to person, starting from sales and cascading like the old telephone game down the line until it reaches the people who need it to design products or services.  By then it has been translated, filtered, and morphed into something that no longer resembles the actual customer need or problem.

Our team at Old Norse can help you develop a robust, effective system to deeply understand customer’s wants, needs, and problems.  We combine several effective tools and methods in a unique way that allows you to gain critical insights and clear priorities.  This comprehensive knowledge allows you to define not just your next project but your strategies for the next 5-10 years.  We help you connect the gap between your organization’s capabilities and customer’s needs, wants, and problems.

The process of taking a product or service from concept through market introduction is fraught with challenges.  While there are many technical challenges to overcome, most companies struggle just as much with challenges and problems created by the product development processes they are working within.  Our team has extensive hands-on experience leading companies to significant improvements in their product and process development systems.

Whether you’re experiencing long delays, missed project goals, or lackluster product launches, we can help you build a powerful product development system.  We begin by working directly with a cross-functional team of your people, performing a thorough current state assessment to identify problems and opportunities.  We then provide your team with new knowledge of concepts and tools for better product development processes.  We help you manage the improvements to your product development system and drive adoption through highly effective simulation-based training.

Business processes have two universal characteristics.  First, most (if not all) of the work is contained inside the software, computers, and servers and virtually invisible.  Second, virtually all processes are interlinked with other processes.  These two characteristics make improving business processes quite challenging.  The team at Old Norse has extensive experience in business process improvement in organizations of all sizes and within every function.  Whether it’s a small team accounting process or a broad, cross-functional process like product development or S&OP, we’ve been there and done it. 

Companies employ a variety of technology and software systems to run their business.  Many times off-the-shelf systems are a one-size-fits-all approach, and instead of the software enabling business success, the business ends up operating in a fashion that enables the software’s success, at the expense of the business’s success.  

We have years of experience across all types of system platforms to help with this problem.  With our approach, the business operations drive the technology solutions and not the other way around.  We accomplish this through changes in processes and procedures, augmenting the current software, or in some cases completely replacing systems with custom applications. 

Finance & Accounting processes are often overly complex because teams are unsure of making changes that continue to comply with audits.  We can assist with improving processes and streamlining procedures that both adhere to audit and make you faster, more efficient, and result in fewer errors. 

Whether you are a new or existing private business, we can help you set up or improve your accounting system, working alongside your CPA, to ensure that you avoid mistakes in that setup which could consume valuable time down the line.  We can also work with your AR/AP staff, providing best practices, comprehensive checklists, and documentation systems.