The Case Group: Setting up a Case Programme in Management Development Available to Purchase

The development of a case programme in the Canadian Centre for Management Development, a new institution mandated to help strengthen the Canadian public service, is examined. The programme marked the first formal and extensive use of this type of development in government. Building it taught some important lessons: for example, producing bilingual editions of cases was more difficult than writing them. The major challenges were quickly to create and operate the technologies of case writing and production, establish an initial inventory of top quality cases, and obtain institutional support for the case method. The first two were fairly easy to do, but the latter has been only partly successful. Work is continuing on driving the roots of the case method deeply into the institution.