Case study: State and local government
Helping a CFO with an organizational assessment at a state regulatory agency
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When a new Commissioner took office, a state regulatory agency entered a period of rapid transition, which included the onboarding of a new CFO. The new CFO stepped into a fiscal unit facing several challenges, including: open positions, an overwhelmed staff with growing workloads, and knowledge gaps from recent turnover.
With the end of the budget cycle approaching, the CFO needed a clear understanding of how the team was operating to make informed staffing decisions and better address the challenges his team was facing. The organization partnered with Eagle Hill to conduct a comprehensive organizational assessment of the fiscal unit.
Rather than relying on organization charts and job descriptions alone, we engaged directly with staff to understand day-to-day workload, pinpoint where people were stretched too thin, determine which challenges posed the greatest operational risks, and identify opportunities to improve organizational effectiveness. The result was a candid, data-backed picture of staffing needs and practical recommendations to help the CFO strengthen team structure and support future organizational design decisions.
Goal
Conduct an organizational assessment of the fiscal unit to build a future-state organization chart and recommendations for improving operational efficiency and organizational effectiveness.
Unconventional consulting—and breakthrough results
Our assessment revealed the potential for significant improvements in organizational effectiveness:
workforce capacity increase to alleviate backlog
improvement opportunities identified
future-state organization charts developed
The challenge: Assessing an organization in motion
Assessing an organization amid major transition comes with unique challenges. In this case, the shift to a new CFO happened quickly and unexpectedly. The previous CFO had served for decades, and long-standing ways of working were deeply ingrained. Given the ever-changing environment, it was difficult to distinguish between true pain points and the normal turbulence of transition. However, we knew getting to the root causes of the challenges was critical to the organizational assessment. To overcome these challenges, we focused on grounding the assessment by connecting with the people closest to the day-to-day work.
The roadmap to success: Grounding the assessment in the employee perspective
At the core of our organizational assessment approach is a commitment to incorporating employee perspectives. We know that the people closest to the work provide the most accurate picture of how an organization truly operates and reliable insight into areas for improvement. Key activities included:
Conducting one-on-one interviews and reviewing exit interview data.
We facilitated candid conversations with staff to understand how they were spending their time, surfacing insights that no job description or organization chart alone could reveal. These discussions clarified where employees saw opportunities for improved organizational efficiency. We also analyzed exit interview data, which offered critical insights into tenure patterns and understanding why employees were leaving their roles. This data provided another viewpoint into staff challenges and opportunities to mitigate challenges.
Gathering insights from senior leadership.
In addition to employee perspectives, we engaged the Chief Deputy Commissioner and Operations Deputy to capture leadership priorities and expectations for the fiscal unit. These discussions clarified how leadership envisions fiscal supporting broader agency goals, highlighted key pain points in staffing and operations, and defined what success looks like moving forward. Incorporating this perspective ensured our recommendations were aligned with strategic priorities and positioned the CFO to meet leadership expectations.
Partnering closely with the CFO.
We worked closely with the CFO to confirm assumptions, align on priorities, and incorporate early feedback. Our close partnership enabled us to develop practical recommendations that would fit into the organizational culture and meet their unique needs.
The path forward: From putting out fires to planning ahead
Our in-depth assessment resulted in six critical findings, each presented in an Organizational Assessment report. We uncovered challenges that had organizational efficiency impacts, including: understaffed teams, increased turnover, a need for better process documentation, high reliance on paper-based and manual processes, reduced team morale, and the team’s limited role in strategic efforts.
With a strong understanding of the challenges the fiscal team was facing, we crafted recommendations and an implementation plan to address each.
Another key output from our findings was two future-state organizational design options, which presented the CFO with possibilities on how to alleviate growing backlog and meet anticipated increases in workload. Moreover, our fresh perspective allowed us to offer creative staffing solutions such as developing a dedicated position focused on improving staff productivity or increasing staff capacity through automated low-code solutions. By adding a resource who understands both the technology and the team’s workflows, the unit can ensure it is fully leveraging automation to support smarter, more efficient operations.
The CFO and other senior leaders valued the independent viewpoint we brought to the organizational assessment and that our recommendations surfaced insights that weren’t immediately apparent. As one leader shared, “A lot of us had suspicions and assumptions that you validated through the assessments. There were also a couple of points we didn’t initially think about that came out of the team organization assessment.”
The organizational assessment offered the CFO the clarity that he didn’t have the bandwidth to develop alone given the demands of his new role. With a clear view of workloads and team dynamics, he is now positioned to work more strategically—better managing critical tasks, closing knowledge gaps, strengthening staff engagement, and freeing up bandwidth to focus on strategic priorities.
