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

Results
duties. The program also required a work pace that differed from Bureau’s
norms. The planning horizon of Bureau’s normal operations was long and
the culture promoted a steady pace of work. However, the early phase of the
program had often required working overtime to meet the strict deadlines
of data gathering, analysis, and program planning. The program manager
described this difference in work pace:
Q11 (Bureau, program manager): “[Besides external consultants] our own people
also have to fully commit to the goal and to the work method. As I said to the
people in the core team, if a problem appears, we’ll stay at work until midnight,
whether or not this suits the office culture.”
Social and identity boundaries were not very visible in Bureau. Most
people who had participated in the program planning activities were highly
motivated to participate in renewing the organization’s IT management,
and they clearly identified themselves with the program. Still, they also
seemed committed to their permanent organizational units and their
permanent positions. As one project participant stated:
Q12 (Bureau, project participant): “I think that people have had the opportunity
to do something that they relate to, something that they are motivated to do and
that will benefit them in their own work in the future.”
Yet, some interviewees in Bureau suspected that the employees (especially
those in the local units) who had not been involved in the early program
activities were not familiar with the change program and thus were not
committed to the program’s goals. Also, the program had originally been
promoted as mainly technical and IT related, and some still connected the
program solely with IT instead of regarding it as a wider attempt to renew
Bureau’s management.
Finally, similarly as in Center, there were some indicators of a knowledge
boundary, as the program was supposed to affect virtually every employee
in Bureau but not everyone was aware of the program and its status. At the
time of the interviews, during the early implementation, some people in
Bureau expressed their concerns related to the program’s distance from the
top management and from the eventual end-users of its results. The
following quote describes this situation.
Q13 (Bureau, project participant): “In general, one might say that there has been
too large a distance between the top management and [the program’s key
actors]. The top managers’ view of the end state and the direction is not
transmitted to those implementing the program.”
To sum up the findings, in Bureau the overall boundary between the
program and the parent organization was somewhat less apparent than in
Center, but still quite visible. Apparently, the boundary had become
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