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

Results
Regarding the third case, the program in Chain aimed at extensive
changes in many features of the organization. The program was supposed
to transform the entire service process in Chain’s largest business area,
including the related services, infrastructure, logistics, and principles for
organizing work. Reflecting the wide scope of the intended change, the
program organization was complex, including tens of different projects
organized into sub-programs and further into development areas, with
numerous interdependencies and multiple linkages with Chain’s other
activities. The amount of external dependencies and connections
presumably partly contributed to the large amount of reported boundary
activity. To illustrate the complexity of Chain’s program, a project manager
described the early planning activities in the following manner:
Q87 (Chain, project manager): “Especially in the early days it was hard to make
a distinction between these sub-programs, since there are a million cause-andeffect
relationships among all these projects.”
Due to the wide program scope and high complexity, it would have been
virtually impossible to prepare the plans for Chain’s program within a small
group of people. A wide base of expertise was required and thus program
planning was from early on decentralized, giving responsibility for planning
to sub-programs and to project teams, each with their unique approach to
planning and their individual methods for project management and for data
gathering, coordination and communication across the project’s
boundaries. To ensure requisite coordination, the portfolio decision making
process led by the program steering group was established. The
interviewees described that due to the complexity of the program and the
novelty of the challenge it had taken a few years to find the appropriate
organization and governance structure for Chain’s program. At the end of
the initiation stage the program structure and the governance model were
regarded as functional and purposeful.
4.6.3 Maturity of the parent organization in terms of large-scale
change
The third contextual factor that may explain many of the differences across
the cases is the overall maturity of the parent organizations in terms of
large-scale change. This may also be interpreted as initial readiness for
change. The analysis showed how this initial readiness to launch and
implement a change program varied.
From the three organizations, Center was the least experienced in
systematically conducting internal changes. In Center just the concept of a
change program caused significant confusion and even suspicion. It seemed
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