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

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Q4 (Center, program manager): ”My authority was never defined ... There was
never any discussion on that. I was given a task, but the related authority, the
direction and the goals had not been defined, and I felt left alone with that.”
In contrast to the other boundary types, physical and spatial boundaries
were not particularly visible in Center. There were no clear physical
boundaries surrounding the program as the program team was not isolated
from the rest of the organization: the participants contributed to the
program work from their permanent office locations and were thus in
constant interaction with the colleagues that were not actively involved in
the program. Case Center still demonstrated some indicators of spatial
boundaries. Program initiation and planning activities took place in the
Center’s headquarters, but the changes promoted by the program were
supposed to affect Center’s numerous geographically scattered member
organizations. Thus, there was a clear distance between the emerging
change program and the recipients of the change. Additionally, many of
Center’s experts spent much of their work time outside Center, typically in
the member organizations’ and other stakeholders’ premises, which made it
difficult to schedule program-related meetings between the key program
actors and other experts in Center. One program participant described the
situation in the following way:
Q5 (Center, program participant): “Communication is always a problem in this
kind of an organization where everyone is travelling two or three days a week.”
Many indicators of the temporal boundary could also be identified in
Center. The differences in the time orientation between the change program
and the parent organization’s daily operations were noticeable, and many
program participants, both managers and experts, complained about the
lack of time to devote to program work, blaming the busy schedules of the
daily routines. Some also stated that since the early program work had not
involved predefined deadlines, they had prioritized other smaller tasks that
were more clearly defined and involved short-term deadlines. Furthermore,
as described above, there were difficulties related to scheduling meetings as
many of the Center’s experts spent a considerable amount of their work
time outside Center’s premises, and these difficulties contributed to the
perceived lack of time for program-related cooperation.
The analysis also revealed traces of social and identity boundaries. The
identification with the change program did not seem to fully follow the
programs’ formal organization chart, but there were varying views of
whether the program participants saw themselves as a part of the program
organization or not, and who else they included as program members. In
Center, the interviews showed how both managers and experts seemed to
identify more with their home units and their daily work than with the
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