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

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program was seen to be on track, although some individual projects had
suffered from delays.
To plan the implementation phase of the program, local change groups
had been recently established in Chain’s local units. Some people were still
concerned that the local units had not been involved enough in the
program, which caused uncertainty concerning the forthcoming
implementation efforts. At the time of the second round of interviews the
implementation phase was planned to take another two years, after which
the pursued savings were hoped to be realized.
In the further analyses, the program initiation in case Chain is viewed to
start when Domain’s management board sketched the early program
structure in the strategy seminar. The program initiation took about two
years and ended just before the second round of interviews, when most of
the program’s projects had finalized their plans and reached early
implementation.
4.2 Indicators of the boundary between a change program and
its parent organization
The first research question addresses the boundary between a change
program and its parent organization. Next, the identified indicators of the
boundary are presented, results for each case are described, and the
findings are summarized.
4.2.1 Indicators of the program-parent organization boundary
To gain a more in-depth understanding of the nature of the programparent
organization boundary, the indicators of the boundary were
analyzed. With the help of previous literature on organizational boundaries,
a categorization of different aspects of the boundary was constructed during
the analysis of the research data. Building on the categorizations of
organizational boundaries presented by Hirschhorn and Gilmore (1992)
and Scott (2003), the boundaries between the change programs and their
parent organizations were analyzed to be formed from six types of
boundaries: task boundaries, authority boundaries, temporal boundaries,
physical and social boundaries, social and identity boundaries, and
knowledge boundaries. Table 12 describes how each of these boundary
types appeared in the research data, and Figure 11 provides an illustration
of the different boundary types.
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