Boundary activities and readiness for ... - Projekti-Instituutti

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infrastructure, the organization, and the management system. IT had
become increasingly important for Bureau in its core activities and
administration, but the existing system was considered too complex,
decentralized, and costly. As an example, there were hundreds of different
IT systems and programs in use across the Bureau’s units. With the change
program, Bureau sought a more centralized, flexible, and cost-effective IT
solution. From the many units of Bureau, the IT unit and one department
within the headquarters were the most active in the program. However,
more than 500 employees participated in the program, and the results were
planned to affect practically all of Bureau’s thousands of employees. An
internal change program of this magnitude had never before been
implemented in Bureau. The planned program duration was eight years,
from which initiation and planning took about three years.
Program initiation can be traced back to a specific event. A large IT
company approached the government ministry which was formally in
charge of Bureau’s operations and made an offer to take over Bureau’s IT
management. As there were pressures to rationalize public sector
operations, this was an attractive offer for the ministry. However, not all of
Bureau’s managers agreed. The CEO of Bureau discussed the offer with a
manager working closely with IT management, the future program
manager, and they agreed that the offer was unrealistic and it was not in the
best interests of Bureau. Still, they saw this as an opportunity to start
developing Bureau’s IT management. As the soon-to-be program manager
stated, they wanted to exploit the momentum created by the IT company’s
offer.
To assure the decision makers in the ministry that the external offer by
the IT company should be declined, Bureau’s CEO appointed the soon-to-be
program manager to come up with an alternative plan. With some help
from a colleague, the program manager outlined a solution by synthesizing
the ideas that had been discussed during the past few years about how to
develop Bureau’s IT management. The CEO and the ministry’s decision
makers accepted the plan and decided to proceed with the idea. The
program manager was officially appointed to lead the emerging program.
For the next month, the program manager elaborated the plans, and after
the initial solutions were outlined, he hired a consultancy company to
support the initiation process. Two months after the initial meeting the first
phase of the program was officially launched.
The first phase, the analysis of the current state, was led by the program
manager and a few other experts in Bureau. With the help from the external
consultants, they introduced a workshop-based method for collecting and
analyzing data on the current state of Bureau’s IT management. Employees
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