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

Results
Instead of an official program manager, a program coordinator was
appointed for defining a management procedure for the program and
administrating the program. Based on the discussions with a number of
Domain’s central managers, the newly appointed program coordinator
designed a management approach for the program where the projects
formed a portfolio, and the program steering group had regular meetings to
make portfolio decisions on project starts, milestones and closures. Apart
from the centralized portfolio decisions, the program coordinator let each
development area, sub-program, and project to design their own
management structure, including the reporting and documentation
procedures and the potential steering groups. To ensure some level of
coordination across the program activities, the program coordinator
gathered a coordination team of active people from different parts of the
program organization, whose task was to serve as a support team in
program-wide coordination and administration.
The first round of interviews was conducted about a year after the
program initiation decision, when the program as a whole was still in the
early planning stage. At that time there were around 30 projects in the
program, most of them in the planning phase. A couple of projects that had
been started before the program was established were already in execution.
Some projects were implemented solely by Chain’s personnel, while others
involved suppliers and partners. At the time of the first round of interviews,
the program was being planned mainly within Chain’s headquarters.
Although the program was supposed to affect the work of practically all
employees in Chain’s local units, not much had been communicated about
the program to those employees.
The first round of interviews revealed how Chain’s program had initially
been quite dispersed, but in the course of time, as the number of projects
had increased and numerous interdependencies between the projects had
been identified, mechanisms for program-wide coordination had been
established. These included shared reporting templates, joint workshops
and meetings as well as informal communication at different management
levels of the program. The role of the coordination team had evolved, and at
the time of the interviews there was still active debate about how to define
the coordination team’s activities and make them more efficient. Most of
the interviewees thought that the program was little by little finding its
course. Still, some people described how it was difficult to proceed with
detailed planning since there was so much uncertainty related to the plans.
They complained about the lack of a concrete vision of the future state of
the organization. Several people also pointed out that one of the
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