Oakes Consulting
01
Operational diagnosis
An honest read of how the work actually runs, rather than how the chart says it does.
Operations and process design
The work has outgrown the way it is run.
We help churches, ministries, and businesses build the systems underneath the work. Found honestly, designed simply, and handed back to your team.
What we do
It usually starts with one of these
Find what is actually wrong, design what replaces it, build it, and hand it back so your team can run with it. Working out which of these you need is what the first conversation is for.
02
Process and policy design
What to start, what to stop, and what to keep, written so people will follow it.
03
Systems and automation
The software you already pay for, made to do the job.
04
Handover and training
Your team owning it. Trained on the real system, with the first cycles walked through together.
How we work
Most process work fails on the people, not the process
A beautiful process nobody follows is not a process.
Almost every one I have seen fail was designed well enough. It failed because nobody asked what the people running it could actually carry, on a normal week, alongside everything else they already do.
My doctorate is in industrial and organizational psychology, which is the study of how people and organizations actually behave rather than how a diagram says they should. That is where this work breaks down, and it is the part I was trained on.
Start simpler than you think you need. Adding a step later is easy; removing one is nearly impossible. Automate what nobody should be remembering, because every manual hand-off is a place the work can quietly stop. And go after the cause, since fixing what surfaced this month without asking why only buys a few weeks.
The point of it
The goal is that you stop needing me
Consultant dependency is a documented problem, and the usual cause is simple. A firm that grows by renewing engagements cannot really promise its own removal. So this is structural rather than a promise.
You hold the keys
Every account and credential is yours from day one. Nothing runs on software only I can operate.
Written for the next person
Documentation is written for whoever holds the job after you, not as a record of what I did.
Tested without me
Before an engagement closes, your team runs the system with me out of the room, while there is still time to fix what is missing.
Who you would be working with
You get me
Not a team you met once and never saw again, and not a junior consultant working from a template. The person who sits in your meetings is the person who builds the thing, and the person still there when your team takes it over.
More about me →Start a conversation
At the heart of all this, I genuinely want to help. Tell me what is going on and we will work out whether it makes sense for both of us. Sometimes it does not, or you need less than you thought and can do it yourselves. Either way, you know where I am.