Building An Enduring Structure: Minnesota's Office of Enterprise Sustainability

This case study highlights the leadership, culture, measurement, and process of creating a sustainable governance structure for a statewide Sustainability initiative. 

Pursuing A Vision: Nebraska's Center of Operational Excellence

This case study highlights the development of Nebraska's Center for Operational Excellence, including how Nebraska worked through structural and personnel changes, culture change, internal resistance from key stakeholders, competing priorities, political pressures, developing a sustainable model and analyzing costs and benefits.  

NASCA Case Studies

View all case studies from the NASCA Institute on Management and Leadership dating back to 2012. 

2019-2020 Top Ten Priorities of State Chief Administrators

State Chief Administrator's Guidebook on Transitions

NASCA partnered with past chief administrators for advice and tactics for new public sector executives. 

This publication builds on multiple NASCA publications and resources and served as a guidebook for the in-person Boot Camp curriculum at the 2019 Spring Conference. The guidebook is broken into four sessions that can be replicated. 

The Art of Leading a State Agency

NASCA partnered with Paul Campbell, former Director of the Department of Central Management Services for the State of Illinois and ex-officio Executive Committee and Corporate Council Co-Chair of NASCA, to produce The Art of Leading a State Government Agency to provide useful insights for not only new chief administrators but government managers and stakeholders.

Job One: Reimagine Today's State Government Workforce

State governments face growing challenges attracting, building and retaining critically important talent and workforce skills. New research from NASCA in collaboration with Accenture and NEOGOV with assistance from the National Association of State Personnel Executives (NASPE) suggests that as the public and private sectors battle for talent, government is falling too far behind in preparing for the workforce of the future. Job One for states is to start rethinking their workforce. This report provides a roadmap and clear recommendations for state leaders, governors, and legislators as well as highlights leading state examples.

State Chief Administrator's Survey

The responsibilities of a State Chief Administrator (SCA) are numerous and varied –managing critical state functions, providing services and support to other agencies, navigating uncertain and challenging political environments, and competing with the private sector for talent. To meet these responsibilities, SCAs must develop and execute strategies that push their agencies to perform better, seek new and innovative methods and tools to meet their goals, and develop a culture that attracts and retains high-caliber talent. In order to help SCAs meet these challenges, the National Association of State Chief Administrators (NASCA) and McKinsey & Company partnered to survey and report on key issues affecting today’s SCAs. The survey gathered information on SCAs’ agency responsibilities, changes to funding, allocation of time, strategy development, priorities, and the challenges they face. The survey probed into procurement, digitization and automation, areas of interest to many SCAs. 

Relentlessly Engaged: The State of Michigan's Employee Survey and The Office of Performance and Transformation

On January 1, 2011, Rick Snyder was inaugurated as Governor of Michigan amid one of the starkest economic periods in state history. From 2000 to 2009, incomes in the state plummeted from being the 18th-highest in the country to 38th place, a decline that only a few states had experienced since the Great Depression. What’s more, in 2009, Michigan became the first state in 25 years to eclipse 15 percent unemployment. Finally, numerous companies and municipalities (including General Motors and Detroit) had declared or were on the brink of bankruptcy. For the Michigan economy, the 2000s were a “lost decade.”

Michigan’s economic woes had a pernicious impact on state employees. The loss of revenue resulted in the budget becoming “structurally broken,” forcing the state to implement “early outs” and furloughs and eliminate training. Thus, when Snyder declared that “The reinvention of Michigan must not leave anyone behind,” he was referring to not only the hundreds of thousands of Michiganders who had lost jobs but also the tens of thousands of state employees serving them. 

The Perfect Storm: The State of Kansas Moves Its HR and Finance Systems to the Cloud

In 2015, the State of Kansas was scheduled to perform what was supposed to be a routine upgrade to the software that supported its accounting system. However, as the deadline approached, officials realized that the transition would be anything but ordinary. Instead, they recognized a set of challenges that created what Sarah Gigous, the Director of the Office of Systems Management in the Department of Administration (DOA), later described as “the perfect storm.” To begin with, they were struggling to recruit technical staff, resulting in the costly practice of retaining an on-site consultant. In addition, they were wrestling with how to replace aging infrastructure that supported the system, a thorny issue because the state’s Chief Information Technology Officer (CITO) was contemplating IT consolidations and did not want departments building costly new systems. Finally, DOA was operating in a constrained fiscal environment, meaning that they could not spend their way out of the problem. These difficulties came to a head when the CITO informed Jim Clark, then the Secretary of Administration, that “they just couldn’t provide us with the support we needed.” “Everything was happening at the same time,” Gigous said, “and we thought, ‘We’ve got to look outside the box and [see] what can we do?’”