SPARKing Process Innovation

Here’s the thing about standard operating procedures: They work great… for groups doing work they were built for. In my last team, Modern Work, we were able to leverage SAFe (Agile) methodologies, Azure Dev Ops tracking, and more to support a huge swath of Microsoft and 3rd party software platforms.

But recently, we started building something different. We formed a new team that is - to put it mildly - an eclectic mix. We have builders in Bangalore sitting (virtually) next to governance admins in Boston. We have data analysts in Chicago brainstorming with product strategists in Seattle.

When you have that kind of “Avengers Assemble” variety, the standard rituals start to crack. And yes, we did this on purpose. SPARK AI is an “internal startup” built to pivot and leap to support Huron’s internal AI needs wherever they pop up. We can plug in, accelerate, and enable teams around the enterprise thanks to our diverse and leadership-endorsed team roster.

If we did a classic Scrum stand-up, half the room would tune out while the devs discussed API endpoints, and the other half would check email while the product pros discussed curriculum design and change comms. We’re all human, it’s okay. Unless you’re one of our Agents, come to life at some unknown point in the future. In which case I hope this blog has aged well for my own sake…

We realized pretty quickly: We didn’t want to shove this team into a process that didn’t fit. We wanted a process that suited us.

We needed a rhythm that honored our diversity without creating silos. And - because we are who we are - we needed it to be future-proof and AI-ready.

Enter SPARK Sync and the SPARK Plug.

The “Square Peg” Problem

When you’re building a team with an evolving mix of product work, development, education, and analytics, “Status” means something different to everyone.

For a dev, status is “I merged the PR.”
For a strategist, status is “I’m rethinking the Q3 narrative.”
For an educator, it might be “I finally cracked how to explain this feature without making everyone’s eyes glaze over.”

Forcing these updates into a rigid 15-minute morning call wasn’t just inefficient; it was actually eroding our culture. It amplified our differences instead of our shared objectives. And is it really ever only 15 minutes?

We needed a way to stay informed without forcing everyone to sit through the technical minutiae of a role they don’t play.

The Solution: SPARK Sync

(The “Choose Your Own Adventure” Update)

So we pulled status out of the meeting entirely and gave it its own lane.

We call it SPARK Sync.

Under the hood, SPARK Sync is a proactive PowerApp automation workflow that shows up where we’re already working: Microsoft Teams.

Here’s how it works:

• Every morning, each team member gets a direct Teams message with a simple adaptive card: Yesterday, Today, Blockers
• You fill in your three quick fields
• You get a short “thanks” and you’re done

Behind the scenes, SPARK Sync:

• Captures each person’s inputs
• Routes them into a central Sync channel in Teams as individual replies to a parent post for the day
• Builds a written, searchable stream of what’s happening across the team

Then, early in the US morning, the workflow taps Copilot to:

• Summarize all the collected replies into a single, narrative-style update in the Sync channel
• Kick off the next day’s cycle by triggering a fresh set of “Yesterday, Today, Blockers” prompts

So instead of status disappearing into a call that only exists in memory, we now have a living record of the work plus a daily executive summary. My team can make their update when and how they want from Boston to Bangalore!

Why this works for a hybrid, cross-functional team:

• Relevance
  Analysts and builders can skim dev updates for data pipeline changes and skip the UI details. The educator can focus on curriculum shifts and ignore deployment minutiae. Everyone gets what they need, when they need it.

• Context
  Because SPARK AI is a new team, we’re literally writing our history in real time. Each day’s Sync becomes another tile in a shared “digital memory palace”. This is a huge boon not just for leadership, but for any new joiner trying to understand how we actually work.

• The Copilot Factor
  This is the part that still makes me smile. Because our status lives as structured text in a channel, Copilot can actually read it. A new teammate can ask, “What did the education arm focus on last week?” or “Where are we stuck on integrations?” and get an instant, context-rich answer.

We don’t need to record every meeting, waste terabytes of space per year, and sacrifice a sense of comfortable privacy in every one of our calls. Instead we get the value out of the original intent of a standup at a fraction of the cost and annoyance.

The Glue: SPARK Plug

(Connection Over Inspection)

Of course, if we went fully async, we’d lose something important: the human element. In putting together a team dedicated to AI and automation, one of my top priorities is permanently a human-centric focus.

For a team with such wildly different skill sets, cross-pollination isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s how we avoid becoming several separate teams sharing a logo. We were rapidly approaching this with the Modern Work team and didn’t want to repeat history so quickly.

So we took the time that used to be reserved for status and reinvested it into a weekly, 30 to 60 synchronous ritual:

We call this SPARK Plug.

The rule is simple and non-negotiable: No Status Updates.

If you want to know status, read the Sync channel or the Copilot summary.

If you want to build culture and connect the dots, come to Spark Plug.

We use that hour for things that actually benefit from everyone being “in the room” together:

• Demos
  “Show me what you built.” Builders walk through a new feature; educators react to how it will land in training; product folks poke at the roadmap implications. It’s half usability lab, half show-and-tell.

• Connections
  Real conversations about how product, education, and analytics intersect. “If we ship this experiment, how does that change what we teach?” “If we alter feedback gathering for this workflow, what could we learn next quarter?”

• Decisions
  The discussions that deserve synchronous brainpower. Tradeoffs, priorities, naming, go/no-go calls - anything that benefits from instant feedback and shared nuance.

• Just Being Humans Some weeks we just want to talk about holiday plans, funny pet stories, or the latest board game somebody picked up. Of course these conversations happen at random during the week too, but it’s way easier and more inclusive to get everybody in the same digital “room” regularly and just let watercooler time happen.

Status moved out of the meeting and value moved in.

Designing for the Team You Have

The biggest lesson here wasn’t about the tech (though I am unreasonably proud of the PowerApp and Copilot loop piloted by myself and properly launched by Anuj Pathak).

It was about agency.

We didn’t accept the default “Agile Playbook” just because it’s industry standard. We looked at the actual humans in the room: the writers, coders, trainers, analysts, and strategists - and asked a simpler question:

“What would help this team flow?”

SPARK Sync and SPARK Plug are just our answers to that question:

• Async where information is the goal
• Sync where connection and decisions are the goal
• Copilot sitting underneath, quietly turning our daily work into a reusable asset

You don’t need our exact tools or acronyms to do this. But you do need the interest, ability, and initiative to question the rituals you inherit from small to large.

The Result

We’re still iterating. (We always are.) But the shift has been noticeable:

• Builders are getting more uninterrupted deep work time instead of losing their morning to a meeting that may or may not apply to them.
• Product and strategy folks have clearer, written visibility into what’s moving, without having to chase it in DMs.
• Educators and enablement feel more connected to the build process through demos and discussion, not just release notes after the fact.
• Leaders get a daily Copilot summary that reflects the whole team, not just the loudest voice in a stand-up.

And Copilot? It’s quietly indexing all of it: our experiments, our blockers, our decisions, so onboarding the next wave of talent looks less like “shadow Chris for a month” and more like “ask good questions of a rich, living history.”

Also, to be kind to “the me of a decade ago” who learned Agile on-the-job and was terrified I’d be tracked against every little update or lack thereof? Our AI summary of the prior days replies does NOT call out if you forgot to submit for the day. Or the whole week! Or had a repeat item. All it cares about is giving a summary of what the team brought to the table, one day at a time. Put the useful data forward and then help your fellow humans to do things an AI never could anyway: be kind and lift each other up as we learn together.