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

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practice, guarding activities may be about not including some
organizational units or some people in the program, or refusing to utilize
some of the parent organization’s standard procedures in the program
work. They may also be about purposefully scoping some issues out of the
program. Examples are given below:
Q33 (Center, coordination group member): “A representative of our unit has not
been invited to these meetings, even though this person is probably one of the
leading experts [in this area] in Finland.”
Q34 (Bureau, project participant): “There is this [project audit procedure] that
should in principle be applied to all IT programs, projects and systems … But
this is like the shoemaker’s son going barefoot: the projects in [the program]
have not followed [the policy].”
Correspondingly, enclosing activities are about blocking the outwards flows
from the program. These activities may include, for instance, keeping the
plans within the core program team and restricting communications about
sensitive issues to some groups within the parent organization. The
following examples illustrate these activities:
Q35 (Bureau, project manager): “From the beginning we realized that if we do
[this project] with a low profile, we will get fewer comments from others. Thus
we started to do this very independently, keeping a low profile, and we don’t
really report to anyone either. … It provides us with freedom and enables fast
operation.”
Q36 (Chain, development area director and original program owner): “I think we
have [communicated the plans] quite openly, except that naturally we have not
told the specific figures of how many people will be affected and how much we
have to decrease personnel.”
Next, the three cases are compared in terms of the boundary activities.
4.3.2 Comparison of boundary activities across the cases
In this section, case-specific counts of boundary activities are presented and
the cases are compared in terms of boundary activity. Altogether 606
quotations referring to boundary activities were identified in the three
cases. Each of these quotations represented instances of one or two
boundary activity types presented in the previous section. As described in
the methodology chapter (section 3.5), the ten different types of boundary
activities were in practice closely related. Many activities described by the
informants were not related to just one type of boundary activity, and thus
some quotes describing boundary activities were connected with two
boundary activity types. Since all 606 quotes illustrating boundary activities
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