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

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Legitimating and committing activities are about making the program
legitimate in the eyes of others and getting people in the parent
organization to commit to the program and support the program work.
These activities may be about actively lobbying for support for the program
and “selling” ideas and plans to others, or they may refer to more subtle
activities, such as convincing and persuasive communication. Similarly as
in the case of positioning and negotiating activities, some activities in this
category are mainly about legitimating and some about committing, but as
many activities seem to represent both, legitimating and committing
activities are viewed as one common type. Examples of the activities are
given below:
Q29 (Bureau, program manager): ”[The original program owner] took care of
the external relations, meaning that he sold this program to [Bureau’s] top
management and acquired the mandate to do this… and he also built awareness
of this program.”
Q30 (Chain, program owner): “During the past year, I have probably spent 60–
70% of my work time with this program … we made this one-time effort to
spread this model to the field and to launch it by demonstrating top
management commitment by going through the local units.”
As the third and last type of outward directed boundary activities,
influencing activities are about changing the parent organization. What
makes these activities distinct from e.g. legitimating and committing
activities is that the target of influencing is not within the program’s official
scope, but it is something else within the parent organization. For example,
early experiences from the program work may have effects on the
organizational work practices or on other projects within the organization.
The next quotes provide examples of influencing activities:
Q31 (Center, unit manager actively involved in the program): “Unrelated to this
program, since I have responsibility of [a certain area], I have started to gather
ideas on how to launch a good program, how to organize a program… So I have
already started to plan a future program, but I cannot launch that yet since we
need to focus on this one.”
Q32 (Bureau, support team manager): ”This [support project] has also
supported operations management and its development in the whole [Bureau]…
It has contributed to the development of the IT support of these processes and
the processes themselves.”
The last category of boundary activities is about blocking the boundary
(Category IV in Figure 12), and this category includes two types of activities.
Guarding activities are about blocking the inwards flows to the program
and in this way protecting the program from external influences. In
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