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

CASE CHAIN
Categories and types of
boundary activities
Description of the activity in the case Examples of quotes Frequency
(total:
531 quotes)
% of
activities
Category I: Defining and shaping the boundary 161 30%
Positioning
and
negotiating
Positioning and negotiating activities included discussions
about the program-related decisions in Chain’s various
management forums, negotiations with representatives of
other business units and negotiations with a personnel
union.
Sub-program manager: “The stakeholder relations within the
organization were characterized by the fact that we needed to find
a direction that the business can support. This gave a certain
flavor to [the planning].”
55 10%
Linking There were many linking efforts, such as linking the
program with Chain’s various management forums and
coordination groups. Additionally, each project had its
own mechanisms for linking with the central stakeholder
groups.
Sub-program manager: ”The same managers were responsible for
the development activities and for running the operations, so we
naturally had a certain amount of contact with “the real life”, with
the people who have spent time thinking about these issues ... This
discussion was constantly active in the background.”
95 18%
Task coordinating Just a few task coordinating activities were found, mainly
related to project-specific needs. For example, IT-based
projects were coordinated with Chain’s overall IT
development roadmaps.
Sub-program manager: ”And we have all these forums besides our
own steering group: there is, for example, this IT coordination
group that views [Chain’s]IT projects as an entity, ensures that
they don’t overlap, and comments on the architecture and other
issues.”
11 2%
Category II: Crossing the boundary inwards 115 22%
Information seeking Information seeking efforts were project-specific, but
project planning typically included workshops, meetings,
and interviews with various experts. Some projects had
specific information requirements that encouraged project
managers to gather information on a wider basis. Much of
the information scouting took place within the program
and thus did not represent boundary activity.
Sub-program manager: ”The managers and superiors of local
units have been involved in the planning phase of these projects…
We need their local expertise, so even though they are not official
members of the project groups, we have different kinds of
workshops with them.”
83 16%
Resource seeking Some resource seeking activities were found, mainly
related to seeking competent in-house project managers
and utilizing support resources in program-related
communications.
Communications expert: ”We realized that this will require a lot
of resources from the Communications department. We concluded
that a full-time PR specialist is required and I was able to
convince one person to take over this task.”
32 6%