A firm built around the work—not a predetermined answer.
Engage Group assembles principal-led, multidisciplinary teams for public entities and organizations facing decisions that cross strategy, finance, operations, development, and design.
Relevant to the challenge. Responsive to the needs, aspirations, and realities of the client.
Complex work rarely starts with a perfectly framed question. More often, a client is balancing service expectations, financial limits, organizational capacity, stakeholder concerns, and a decision that cannot wait for every uncertainty to disappear.
Our role is to bring structure to that reality. We listen closely, test the assumptions, organize the data, and connect the disciplines required to understand what is actually happening. From there, we develop recommendations that address the real problem rather than an imaginary one.
That is why process matters. A good process does more than produce an answer. It creates a common understanding of the facts, makes the tradeoffs visible, and positions the people responsible for implementation to carry the work forward.
Built for the assignment at hand.
Engage Group operates through a core firm supplemented by technical partners. Each team is assembled around the scope, the client’s context, and the decisions that must be made—not around a fixed roster of services.
Principal-led
Senior leadership remains directly engaged in the analysis, the client conversation, and the quality of the final work.
Cross-disciplinary
Financial, operational, engagement, development, program-management, and design capabilities are brought together where the work requires them.
Scaled to the need
The team can serve as a focused study group, an ongoing strategic advisor, a facilitator, a program manager, or the lead for a broader project team.
J. Shane Howard, MBA
Public service, business leadership, military service, and financial and operational analysis brought together in one practical advisory perspective.
J. Shane Howard is the Principal of Engage Solutions Group, LLC. His practice areas span strategic management consulting, financial and economic impact analysis, stakeholder engagement, program and project management, and community planning.
Before returning full time to Engage, Shane spent nearly a decade as Senior Vice President at Burditt Consultants, where his community work centered on planning, stakeholder engagement, economic development, and project management across the firm’s disciplines. He also held strategic and operational management roles there.
In 2010, Shane was elected Jefferson County Tax Assessor-Collector, where he ran the office on an operational excellence and customer service agenda. Wait times dropped, service levels and offerings expanded, the operating budget came down, revenues grew, and hundreds of delinquent properties returned to productive use and the tax rolls.
Shane began his career in the Air Force, serving in Desert Shield/Storm, and went on to management and policy advocacy roles in risk management and engineering firms. He has served in community and industry leadership throughout his career, including seven years as a commissioner of the Beaumont Housing Authority and an appointment as one of four public members of a joint legislative committee on windstorm insurance reform.
Service-focused leadership—Perspective, Good Faith, Knowledge, Empathy, and Confidence delivered with you and on your behalf. In practice, that means candid assessment of constraints and tradeoffs, practical application across disciplines, and solutions responsive to the problem actually in front of the client.
Start with the actual problem.
Do not assume the first question is the only question. Diagnose the context before prescribing the answer.
Make the tradeoffs explicit.
Good decisions require a clear view of cost, capacity, risk, timing, stakeholder realities, and the consequences of inaction.
Design for execution.
The work must be clear, defensible, actionable, and organized around the people who will be responsible for delivering it.