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

Results
During the analysis, the targets of the boundary activities were also
examined. A systematic analysis of the targets could not be conducted since
they often were not mentioned by the interviewees, but a general view from
each case was drawn. In case Center, boundary activities were largely
focused towards the peripheral program participants and towards Center’s
top managers, and very few activities involved the main targets of the
change program, i.e. the member organizations of Center. In the other two
cases, boundary activities were targeted at all organizational levels and at
various stakeholder groups within the organizations. In Bureau and in
Chain, a relatively larger share of boundary activities was targeted towards
the change recipients, in both cases referring mainly to the personnel in
regional units. However, in all three cases several interviewees expressed
fears that the change recipients had not been included actively enough.
Yet another central observation that relates especially to case Center was
that instead of describing actual boundary activities, Center’s interviewees
often described what they thought that should already have been done or
what should be done in the future. Consequently, an additional code
category was created during the coding process, describing the desired or
future actions. These hypothetical activities are naturally not included in
the counts of boundary activities presented in Table 14, but they rather
illustrate the lack of actual boundary activity in Center. As an example,
several peripheral program participants stated that they knew very little
about the program’s situation, and they expressed their wishes for more
communication. Many also complained that the program remained distant
from the daily work of Center’s experts and stated that this work could be
linked better to the program. The quote below provides an example of these
desired activities:
Q37 (Steering group member of Center’s program): “[The program] should
probably be made more visible and people within our organization should be
informed about it. … The communication should be ensured and the program
should be linked to the activities of our experts.”
To conclude the findings of the cross-case analysis, case Chain
demonstrates a significantly high volume of boundary activity and clearly
the most active boundary management across the three cases. When
compared to the other two cases, case Center shows lower boundary
activity, indicating relatively inactive boundary management. While case
Bureau falls between these two, it still indicates fairly active boundary
management, with a considerably high volume of boundary activity.
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