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

Theoretical background
(2005) describe how project managers are challenged to identify the key
stakeholders and decide how and when to involve them in the project.
Recent research has also shown how unexpected events, deviations, or
exceptions that stem from the project’s stakeholder environment may have
an impact on the project (Aaltonen et al., 2010; Hällgren & Maaninen-
Olsson, 2005; Söderholm, 2008). Whereas the traditional project
management perspective has viewed the project’s embeddedness mainly as
a dysfunction and regarded environmental influences as distractions to
project execution, a more recent perspective suggests that embeddedness
should be taken for granted, and one should concentrate on handling
environmental influences in a way that benefits both the focal project and
the surrounding organization(s) (Blomquist & Packendorff, 1998).
Authors adopting the temporary organization view acknowledge the
importance of a project’s or program’s relations with its environment, and
have encouraged more research on this topic (Grabher, 2002; Lundin &
Söderholm, 1995; Lundin & Steinthórsson, 2003; Turner & Müller, 2003).
Although temporary organizations may be embedded in multiple
organizations, complex stakeholder networks and wider institutional fields
(Manning, 2008), the present study focuses on the relationship between a
change program and its parent organization. A change program is affected
by the wider context and it may interact with several external organizations
and groups, but the parent organization provides the immediate operating
environment for the program. As Andersen (2008) notes, the entire
purpose of the program is value creation for its parent organization. Figure
1 depicts the focus of the present study by portraying an internal change
program within its parent organization.
Figure 1 Illustration of a change program embedded in its parent organization
The next section reviews existing literature concerning the interplay of
programs and projects with their parent organizations.
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