Epstein & Fass Associates uses a variety of approaches to help clients achieve their objectives, including traditional consulting involving organizational and operations research, analysis, and advisory services. We also provide training, including a variety of workshops that we customize for each client's situation. And we provide facilitation services including group processes to help organization or community teams identify issues and priorities, solve problems, build strategies, and develop action plans for improvement. Our consulting and facilitation can assist clients in implementing solutions, and we can provide services ranging from periodic one-on-one follow-up consultation to group "learning sessions" to help client teams learn from their experiences and adjust their solutions as they implement them. By having a range of methodologies, we can mix different approaches for each engagement, depending upon the specific needs, resources, and capabilities of client organizations.

Epstein & Fass Workshops available include:

• Using Public Performance Measurement, our most basic measurement workshop, focusing on the utility of performance measures.

• Developing Performance Measures, in which participants, often working as teams, develop draft performance indicators or "working papers" to jump- start development or change of an organization's performance measurement system or a community's system of outcome indicators.

• Strategy Development Using Balanced Scorecard Approaches, in which participants develop or sharpen their own strategies using balanced scorecard logic.

• For workshops and consultations involving the Effective Community Governance Model, please see resultsthatmatter.net/a-c/index.html

Any of our workshops can be customized for a client's specific needs by drawing material from different workshops to meet the unique needs of an engagement. The length of most of our workshops can also vary, depending upon what a client wants to accomplish. Workshops can be provided as stand-alone training experiences, or as integral parts of larger engagements. We try to make workshops experiential, either through the use of pre-designed case exercises, exercises that participants apply to their own projects or work programs, or a combination of both. We incorporate a variety of exercises to involve participants, including role-playing activities to help them develop outcome or service performance measures relevant to key stakeholders.

Mixing Our Service Approaches for Specific Engagements

We view each client, and each engagement, as unique. We work with clients to plan how best to draw from a variety of service approaches — including consultation, facilitation, and training — to meet the client's specific requirements. For example, many of our projects have involved both training and follow-up consulting to help managers refine the strategies or performance measures they develop in our workshops. In other projects, we have mixed customer, citizen, or employee focus groups with organizational climate surveys and operational analyses. In some projects, our consulting recommendations have been followed by our facilitation of action planning sessions with client or community teams where we developed practical implementation plans. These sessions empower employees or citizens by giving them a voice in shaping how change will occur, which in turn increases the likelihood of successful implementation. In some cases, we have stayed with clients beyond studies and action plans and helped them learn from their experiences and improve their solutions while they implement them.