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

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external consultants, but the program manager admitted that he had to a
large extent dictated its content. The program manager characterized the
role of consultants in legitimating the program plans in the following way:
Q73 (Bureau, program manager): “As in this kind of consulting work in general,
if the consultants are properly instructed, the consultant writes [the report] as
he is told to, and then I can present the document and say: “Look, the consultant
has made the same conclusion as I have, the things are as I have always
claimed them to be”.”
Similarly, the legitimacy of the change programs was fostered by
positioning and negotiating activities. During early planning,
representatives of line management were involved in negotiations and
discussions, expressing their views and trying to ensure that their units’
interests were accommodated in the plans. The following quote from case
Chain describes how the key program actors had acknowledged the
importance of gaining the line management’s input and support for the
program plans:
Q74 (Chain, sub-program manager): “The stakeholder relations within the
organization were characterized by the fact that we needed to find a direction
that the business management can support. This gave a certain flavor to [the
planning].”
The authority and autonomy to realize change was also fostered by several
types of boundary activities. Firstly, positioning and negotiating activities
contributed to clarifying and formally defining program authority, since the
authority relations between the emerging programs and the line
organization were decided upon in the negotiations between line managers
and key program actors. The following quote from case Bureau shows that
even though Bureau’s program had initially been granted authority, the
program’s key managers still wanted to discuss the decisions with the line
managers to gain a shared understanding and in this way to make the
changes accepted.
Q75 (Bureau, unit manager actively involved in the program): “I have tried to
gather as good and as wide a representation as possible in these steering
groups … Although I was already given the mandate to implement this during
the early decision making, if we want this to work in practice also in the future,
we need to gain acceptance from all the parties involved. So in these steering
groups we seek common views.”
Linking activities also contributed to providing the programs with
authority by linking the programs with the authority of the line
organization. This was especially visible in case Chain, where the change
program acquired decision-making power through the involvement of
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