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

Introduction
managers and presented how project managers must constantly “sell” the
project to fight for scarce funds, people, materials, and ultimately for the
project’s very existence. Gaddis further described how project managers
must shield the experts of their project teams from external queries and
pressures, while allowing them adequate freedom to develop their skills and
advance their careers. Thus, project management is not only about
managing the project’s internal tasks but also about positioning the project
in the wider organization and actively managing the project’s boundaries.
The early studies by Wilemon and his colleagues (Wilemon & Cicero, 1970;
Wilemon & Gemmill, 1971) similarly noted how project and program
managers have a central position as boundary spanners, linking the
temporary organizations to their surroundings. The current study aims to
explore this boundary spanning task in the context of change programs.
1.2 Focus, motivation and context of the research
This study is an in-depth exploration of how change programs emerge in
their organizational context, and how the interplay between the change
program and its context is managed. The focus is on large-scale change
programs that consist of multiple projects and aim at significant changes in
an organization’s structures, processes, and conduct. The study examines
the early program phases, from the emergence of the program idea to
program planning and preparation. The focus is on the interaction between
the program’s key actors and the representatives of the surrounding parent
organization. The dissertation is centered upon the boundary between the
emerging program and the parent organization, focusing especially on
boundary activities of the core program team that are employed to cross,
build, shape, and guard the boundary in order to build a foundation for
successful program implementation. The research relates to organizational
project management (Andersen, 2008), as opposed to traditional
perspectives that have viewed projects as vehicles for delivering wellspecified
assets and as isolated closed systems. The study is positioned
within the field of project management research, but it aims to answer the
call for multidisciplinary project research (Shenhar & Dvir, 2007a) by also
drawing on organization theory, particularly on the studies of
organizational change and organizational boundaries.
The aim of the study is to provide new theoretical and empirical insight by
exploring how the relationship between a temporary change program and
its parent organization is managed during the early program stage. The
study describes activities that the key actors of a change program employ
when defining and managing the emerging program’s boundary with its
parent organization. Additionally, the findings shed light on how these
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