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