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

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make them enthusiastic about it. One interviewee described the situation in
the following way:
Q82 (Center, expert involved in program initiation): “If the program manager
himself does not yet have a clear idea on what the program is about, then it is
really hard to make others excited about the plans and committed to them.”
Eventually, Center’s program manager was visibly discouraged due to the
lack of support from Center’s top management and the poor progress of the
program, and the interviews indicated how he had even considered leaving
his position as a program manager. The lack of committed and authorized
managers may partly explain the low number of boundary activities in
Center’s program and consequently the low readiness for change program
implementation.
The situation was quite different in case Bureau, where the original
program owner and the original program manager had been in a central
role in initiating the program. Although they did not initially possess formal
authority to drive such large-scale changes, they had a strong vision of the
program and worked actively to get others committed to the proposed
changes, engaging in active boundary management and in this way
purposefully building readiness for change. The emerging program was
widely associated with the program owner and the program manager. The
following quote describes how the role of the program’s key managers was
acknowledged:
Q83 (Bureau, project participant): “I think a central enabler [of program
initiation] was that there were charismatic leaders. Especially [the program
owner] is very charismatic and widely valued in our organization.”
Even though Bureau’s program originally had strong managers, there was a
clear discontinuity in the program’s leadership, as both the program owner
and the program manager left the program organization for other duties.
While new managers were appointed to lead the program, they were not
seen as similarly strong program leaders. The interviewed program
participants reported that there were not enough program-wide
management efforts after the original leaders had left the program
organization.
The change program in Chain seemed to have skilled and committed
managers. While the original program owner (chairman of the program
steering group) had been fairly active in guiding the program, he was
replaced by another person due to a change in the organization structure,
and the new program owner took even a more active and more powerful
approach to leading the program. Also, the expert who was nominated as
the program coordinator did not originally have significant formal
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