ABSTRACT
It is rare that a county human service agency has the opportunity to incorporate an internal organizational development (OD) function to assist with managing organizational change. This is a case study of one such agency that hired an internal OD specialist to facilitate organizational restructuring related to the implementation of welfare reform. The case study is based on the first three years of implementation (1996–1999). It is organized into the following sections: highlights from the literature, the assessment-center approach to hiring an OD specialist, an array of agency-based OD start-up initiatives, and a concluding section on some of the lessons learned from this work in progress.
