Governance, Finance, District Management
Objective advice and solutions that fit your district, are executable, and deliver results and educational value for your district and community.
SIG brings over a decade of experience using best practices based and systems based solutions in governance, finance and district management. Our services can help your district develop the flexibility, responsiveness and focus needed to achieve higher levels of learning.
OUR APPROACH
We work with clients to find and uncover improvement opportunities in your most critical areas and pressing issues. SIG takes the time to understand your major issues and situation, and then selects an approach that will fit. We are flexible in the way we interface with our clients. We serve our clients through brief ½ day or full day sessions, to coaching, and longer term consulting assignments.
We collaborate with you and your team to develop an educational value improvement proposal that will allow you to reach your goals. We then use our framework, strategies and tools to focus on improvements that will deliver the best educational value to your district.
Our frameworks, improvement methods and tools help us uncover the subtle and not so subtle factors that impact efficiency, effectiveness and educational value.
Our deliverable to you is an improvement solution and action plan that is designed to deliver the maximum benefit to your district, customized to your district's situation and specific need.
OUR IMPROVEMENT METHODS
SIG employs best practices, systems, practices and tools that are used by highly successful organizations. SIG has through hands on experience learned how to adapt these to individual situations and school organizations. These methods, practices and models form the basis for our frameworks, strategies, recommendations and solutions. SIG enhances the effectiveness of our efforts by integrating high impact improvement methods such as Six Sigma, Learn Thinking, Process Improvement and Baldrige Criteria for Education.
YOUR BENEFITS AND RESULTS
You and your district will gain access to best practices, data, tools and training that contribute to your professional, leadership and district success. Moreover you will gain access to solutions and learn how to use them in a fraction of the time that it may take without our help.
Objective advice and solutions that fit your district, are executable, and deliver results and educational value for your district and community.
GOVERNANCE
Governance is the system used to direct, influence and control an organization so that it fulfills its mission and goals. Effective governance requires intentional design and integration into daily operations to create strong linkage between strategies, plans, goals day to day actions.
Rethinking the existing governance system should be the starting point for any serious reform or change effort, at the district, division, school or department level.
Board Superintendent Relationship
Strong board - leader relationships are critical to successful governance. SIG can help boards and superintendents improve relations by clarifying roles and responsibilities, resolve difference and gain agreement on required changes and objectives. We find that these services are most necessary during transitions in leadership, significant change, or rising organizational crisis.
Vision Development and Strategic Planning
Effective boards and their superintendents are clear and unified on their vision, mission, goals and values. We can help your board preserve district heritage, develop new directions, assess district readiness for change, and plan for a new future.
Board Structure and Operations
Successful boards spend their time on high level planning, decision making and evaluation. We can help boards improve their effectiveness by clarifying duties, structuring operations, and training in decision making, planning and assessment.
Strategic Board Audits
Boards and superintendents are often inundated with data, yet rarely have the information that provide deep insight needed to support critical thinking and fact based decisions. SIG provides strategic board audits that provided insight into the critical issues affecting their districts or critical strategic issues. Audits are most effective prior to a change in leadership, during transitions, or as an evaluative tool.
Superintendent and Cabinet Level Services
Superintendents and their management teams are ultimately responsible for achieving district goals. Yet many leaders fail to reach their goals because they inherit weak governance systems, organizations and staff. Governance systems allow leaders to lead and manage with a high degree of effectiveness, and personal efficiency. We can assess, develop and help implement changes that will resolve your most critical challenges, increase your leadership effectiveness and improve performance throughout your district.
FINANCIAL CONSULTING
Planning, budgeting, managing and controlling district finances are complex undertakings. School Improvement Group offers a multi faceted approach to evaluating, planning and making optimal use of resources, as well as identifying new sources of funds.
Financial Improvement Plans
We will evaluate current use of resources, help you discover financial improvement opportunities, and provide a financial plan for getting more value from your educational dollars. We can also help identify new sources of funding.
Financial Benchmarking
Our benchmarking services employs measures at the district and department level that will show you how each department compares to peer groups and best performing districts. Our measures do more than show differences; they will provide a line of sight vision into all the factors that drive the cost of delivering a service or program.
Financial Process Improvement
Financial processes and systems as well as accurate financial data are critical to ensuring financial stability and fulfilling stewardship duties. We evaluate your process, policies and systems and data integrity and provide recommendations for improving financial processes.
Financial Restructuring
Some districts are faced with financial problems that require major transformations. We provide the critical, objective data and process for evaluating current organization, contracts, operations, programs and services. We will assist you in identifying more efficient alternatives that won't impact students.
Educational Value Assessment
Budgeting should involve more than justification of additional funds. Getting the most from your educational dollar requires both effectiveness and efficiency. We assess efficiency and effectiveness of district spending through educational value assessment.
DISTRICT MANAGEMENT AND SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT
SIG helps educational leaders make the changes needed to resolve organizational challenges, meet goals, and move districts to higher levels of performance. SIG has helped school leaders address performance issues in educational processes, facilities, operations, finance, administration and technology.
• Facilitate sessions with management teams to learn about systems thinking in educational organizations and identify potential improvement priorities.
• Working with management teams, schools and staff, we analyze data, develop improvement strategies and quantify improvement potential.
• Identify and prioritize changes needed to improve performance.
• Collaborate with staff to develop a solution and plan for realizing your goals that addresses the organizational, process, people and resource issues.
• Design and provide an improvement system for implementing and tracking changes that will produce higher levels of performance.
• Coach and train staff during implementation of changes.
Technology
Technology has become one of the most expensive functions within districts. Properly managed, it can have a major impact on education, administration, assessment, efficiency and school improvement. In fact, strategic information management is becoming even more important as districts learn how to use data to make decisions, plan and improve.
We assess existing technology organizations and systems, and provide solutions for improving focus, raising effectiveness, reducing and controlling costs and using technology to improve operations.
We train staff to become better technology managers and implementers, and serve as expert witnesses in software litigation.
Information Management, Data Warehousing and Decision Making
SIG helps districts learn how to use information to improve district performance, and raise efficiency and effectiveness in all areas. Rather than recommending costly technology solutions, we first help districts develop the critical measurement that are needed for governance, management and school improvement. From here we help develop measurement tools, data collection strategies and recommend technological solutions that fit the district's needs.
Business Operations and Administration
SIG focuses on helping districts improve select support service and operational areas. We use operation specific business models, benchmarks and best practices for evaluating operations. Our approach allows us to identify critical issues impacting the cost, productivity, timeliness and quality of services. Our recommendations provide a detailed road map for launching the changes needed to resolve the issues we discover through our assessment.
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