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

Theoretical background
Grønhaug, 2004; Thiry, 2004a, 2004b; Woodward, 1982). The early stage
also involves the creation of relationships with those outside the core team
to ensure the required support for the program (Woodward, 1982). The
emerging program needs to be integrated into the parent organization and
communication channels must be established (Gareis, 2000).
Related to the early project and program stages, there is a growing stream
of literature on the front-end of innovation, i.e. the early phase of
innovation before the formal decisions on the development (e.g. Murphy &
Kumar, 1996; Nobelius & Trygg, 2002; Poskela, 2009). The innovation
front-end is often described as “fuzzy” (Reid & de Brentani, 2004),
highlighting the related uncertainty and ambiguity. Literature on the
innovation front-end is concerned with idea generation and concept
development, focusing mainly on product and service innovations. Change
programs rather involve process, organizational, or management
innovations (Trott, 2002), which have received less research attention.
The present study aims to provide empirically rooted research evidence
on the early program activities, examining an emerging change program’s
interplay with its parent organization. More research has been requested to
better understand the early stage of a temporary organization and its
linkages with the subsequent lifecycle stages (Atkinson et al., 2006). The
current study links the early program stage to program execution by
studying how the early activities create readiness for program
implementation.
Compared to the project management tradition, the program
management approach is more informed by the literature on strategic
change and organization development (Pellegrinelli, 2002). To better
understand the nature of change programs and their role in the larger
organizational context, the literature on organizational change is reviewed
in the next section.
2.2 Initiating large-scale organizational change
This section summarizes the relevant literature on organizational change
from the perspective of this dissertation. After providing a brief overview to
the literature on planned organizational development and change, the focus
is set on the management of large-scale organizational change by
examining issues that are related to successful change program initiation.
Finally, the concept of readiness for change program implementation is
introduced.
2.2.1 Introduction to large-scale organizational change
Change is pervasive in today’s turbulent business environment.
Organizational change may be defined simply as a transformation of an
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