JLTalley & Associates

Upcoming Classes

These courses are scheduled for the Fall of 2024. They are virtual sessions Tuesday mornings from 10am to noon PST. Zoom credentials will be sent upon registration. And you can register by emailing me directly and include a little about your situation, so we can both be confident the course is appropriate for you.

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The original intent of process improvement was to empower the front line worker, leveraging their greater intimacy with work. Oftentimes they have dramaticallly more experience with execution than the supervisors who ostensibly lead them. But today the field is dominated by software suites that offer greater executive monitoring and the promise of automating work flows. The approach of this course is to step back and characterize a work process in its fullest form; detailed procedures are the least important and the most fluid aspect of process work. Constraining workers through more rigorous monitoring or replacing them with software should be the least of our strategies for process improvement.

This course focuses on the strategic anchors for work in the definitions of quality, other constraints, the required inputs, the enabling resources, and even the desired emotional result of work. We also examine the structure and operation of review mechanisms, which should not only catch errors, but continually reduce them.

AUDIENCE: This course is for anyone hoping to improve how work is executed without having to be a certified Black Belt or a statistician. Process improvement should be a common and continuous tool kit for any supervisor, manager or consultant; it should not be a rare project requiring sanctioned experts to run it.

SCHEDULE: July 9, 16, 23, 30

Most OD consultants start out with a particular focus: teams, change, strategy, leadership, DEI, communication, or the like. Their experience deepens their expertise in that area, but inevitably other issues creep into their practice. At some point, consultants realize they can take on any client, especially those whose distress has no obvious cause or anchor. Their familiarity with organizational dynamics and their knowledge of multiple consulting strategies is broad enough that the more mysterious or complex the problem, the more appealing the engagement.

This course is one consultant’s journey to that level of broad spectrum consulting.

Looking back, it is now clear that my practice depended on a few models to guide the way. These are not theoretical models; they are forged from over 400 client engagements. They did not make me an expert on all things, but they did help me ask the right questions.

1. The Consulting Process: a 4-phase approach to the design and execution of any consulting engagement
2. The Nature of Organizations: a model of all the elements of an organizations; provides a guide for diagnosis and delivery; helps identify what the client is missing
3. Problem Solving: a sixfold typology of problems, which provides a guide for assessment and intervention for presenting symptoms
4. The Nature of Work: a model for defining work processes without reference to departments, functions, or positions
5. The MacroMap of a Company: how to conceptualize the company as a portfolio of work processes, which allows employees to become the designers of their own workplace
6. Strategic Planning: a model for how to approach the “big picture” for the long term; how to embed the strategic plan into the DNA of the company
7. Organizational Change: the 5 layers of any major change effort; clarifies how to avoid the abuses of executive pressure and presumptuous planning and get ahead of employee resistance
8. Team Dynamics: a model of all the contributing factors to team performance, which provides a guide to assessing team dysfunctions

AUDIENCE: This course is for consultants (internal or external) in the first half of their career, wanting to look ahead to the time when they can take on any OD concern, from any client, in any industry.

SCHEDULE: August 13, 20, 27, September 3, 10, 17, 24, October 1