Oakes Consulting
01
Operational Diagnosis
An honest read of how the work actually runs, not how it is supposed to. What turns up is rarely what anyone expected, which is the whole reason for looking.
Operations and process design
The work has outgrown the way it is run.
I help churches, ministries, and businesses build the systems underneath the work. Fifteen years of it inside large organizations, found honestly, designed simply, and handed back to your team.
What I 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. The test is not whether it is written down. It is whether anyone follows it on a busy week.
03
Systems, Automation and AI
The software you already pay for, made to do the job. Sometimes the answer is different software. More often it is the same software, used properly. AI included, where it belongs.
04
Handover and Training
Your team owning it, trained on the real system. If your team cannot run it without me in the room, it is not finished.
How I 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
Every account is yours from day one, the documentation is written for whoever holds the job next, and before I go your team runs the whole thing with me out of the room. A firm that grows by renewing engagements cannot really promise its own removal, so this is built in rather than promised.
How the handover works →
AI
AI, without the hype
I help churches, ministries, and businesses put AI to work on the logistics and keep people where people belong. Training, implementation, policy, tool selection, and the adoption work that makes any of it stick.
Where AI belongs →
Who you would be working with
You get me
One person, on purpose. 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. Nothing gets handed down to someone junior, nothing gets lost between the people who sold it and the people doing it, and you never have to explain your situation twice.
I am in it with you from the first conversation through to the day you no longer need me.
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.