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

Results
areas for cost savings. Based on that work, we created the basis for this
program in the sense that we identified these central entities.”
Secondly, various kinds of information seeking activities aimed at
gathering input for the program plans. In Bureau, as many as 200 people
were somehow involved in the planning activities, and while the program
core team actually had a good idea about the program’s content from the
beginning, the plans were fine-tuned based on the feedback from the larger
audience. In Chain, the key managers of each sub-program and each project
were allowed to decide upon their own ways of how to gather information
during the planning stage. These methods included interviews, surveys,
discussions, and joint planning workshops. In the following quote, a subprogram
manager from Chain describes how it had been fairly easy to
acquire the required input for the program plans:
Q61 (Chain, sub-program manager): “I think that people get interested when
something new is being done, they want to have an impact on how it will turn
out. This is why we haven’t had any problems with getting people involved in
planning and getting them to express their views. If you do not come forward at
this point, or if you skip this opportunity, then it’s no use complaining later on
that the needs of your business unit have not been taken into account.”
Lastly, guarding and enclosing activities were performed to protect the
programs from external disturbances during early planning, thus making
the planning work more efficient. The following quote from Chain shows
how guarding (by limiting the size of the planning team) and enclosing (by
limiting external communication) were used simultaneously to come up
with more creative solutions during program planning:
Q62 (Chain, sub-program manager): “There were initially about 15 people
involved in the project work … We held several meetings and listened to people
but couldn’t get anywhere with it. We were forced to change the organization
and decrease the size of the project team. We even stopped communicating some
of these issues, and started to prepare this with just 3–4 people. … Because it is
typical for that kind of [original] organizing that you are unable to come up
with solutions that are creative enough.”
4.5.2 Identified associations between boundary activities and
resources
Table 18 shows how the boundary activities were analyzed to be related
with securing resources for the change programs. Next, these proposed
associations are described and illustrative quotes from the interviews are
presented.
153