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

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the parent organization and how the program actors are supposed to
collaborate with those representing the line operations and other projects.
Typical examples include establishing reporting procedures and
communication channels, and linking the program to the existing decision
making bodies and instances. The examples below illustrate these activities:
Q19 (Chain, sub-program manager): ”The same managers were responsible for
the development activities and for running the operations, so we naturally had
a certain amount of contact with “the real life”, with the people who have spent
time thinking about these issues ... This discussion was constantly active in the
background.”
Q20 (Center, program manager): “We have this R&D portfolio and we have
categorized its projects under the sub-program titles, we have held meetings to
discuss these connections.”
Also representing boundary defining and shaping, task coordinating
activities relate to the coordination between the program work and other
work conducted within the parent organization, such as other projects or
programs, and ongoing line operations. In practice, task coordination
includes trading information, aligning plans and schedules, and solving
problems across the program’s boundary. Task coordinating activities are
closely related to linking activities and sometimes difficult to distinguish
from them, but while linking activities are about creating linkages and
ensuring connections, task coordinating activities are about utilizing those
connections and coordinating the actual daily work. In this way task
coordinating activities both illustrate and contribute to the permeability of
the boundary. Examples of such activities are given below:
Q21 (Chain, sub-program manager): ”These [permanent] portfolio steering
groups focus on the technology and IT perspective, they check the rationality of
[the project] and also ensure that it fits to the entity of other ongoing projects.
They also coordinate IT resources.”
Q22 (Bureau, unit manager actively involved in guiding program
implementation): ”We have our unit’s management group meeting once every
two weeks, and [the representatives of two central projects of the program] also
participate in these meetings. They tell others about their projects’ situation and
needs, and we have discussions on where to find the required resources.”
The next two types of activities are about seeking input from the parent
organization to the program work, and they represent the inward directed
boundary activities (Category II in Figure 12). Firstly, information seeking
activities aim at gathering information from the parent organization to
advance the program work. Information is sought by utilizing different
kinds of formal and informal methods, and it is used as input in program
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