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Postcards from the Edge: Local Communities, Global Programs and Boundary Objects Jonathan Sapsed and Ammon Salter Organization Studies 2004; 25; 1515 DOI: 10.1177/0170840604047998 The online version of this article can be found at: http://oss.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/25/9/1515

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Authors name

Postcards from the Edge: Local Communities, Global Programs and Boundary Objects Jonathan Sapsed and Ammon Salter

Abstract Jonathan Sapsed University of Brighton, UK Ammon Salter Imperial College London, UK

This paper considers the limitations of project management tools as boundary objects within dispersed or global programs of teamwork. The concept of boundary object is receiving growing attention in the management literature. These artefacts are argued to provide a basis for negotiation and knowledge exchange between differentiated communities of practice. The paper assesses these claims theoretically and empirically in the context of global projects. Theoretically it draws on the literatures on boundary objects, dispersed work and project management tools and organization. The paper then analyses a case study of a global program in a major computing corporation. The program spanned numerous geographical sites across the US, Europe and Japan as well as several functional communities of practice including production, services, sales, IT and company registry. The method involved interviews with 33 program managers at six sites and analysis of program management devices such as integrated timelines, online status reporting tools and modular roadmaps. The paper argues that in dispersed programs where there is no opportunity for face-to-face interaction, and/or ambiguous lines of authority, project management tools will be ineffectual as boundary objects and prone to avoidance. Boundary objects are inherently limited precisely because of their marginal nature, the effects of which are exacerbated in diverse and dispersed programs. Keywords: boundary objects, project management tools, global teams, communities

of practice

Organization Studies 25(9): 1515–1534 ISSN 0170–8406 Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA & New Delhi) www.egosnet.org/os

The concept of boundary object (Star and Griesemer 1989) is currently being applied to project management tools as a means of promoting the sharing of knowledge in practice between diverse groups (Brown and Duguid 2001; Yakura 2002). This paper assesses the limitations of project management tools as boundary objects in globally dispersed projects and programs. It argues theoretically and shows empirically that there are factors that militate against the capacity of these management tools to promote intercommunal negotiation and knowledge sharing in these project business settings. In the next three sections the paper draws on the literatures of dispersed work, boundary objects and project organization to explain theoretically why project management tools may be disadvantaged as boundary objects in international programs. The first section discusses the dispersed teamworking literature; in particular the ‘practice-based’ approach, which insists on the DOI: 10.1177/0170840604047998 Downloaded from http://oss.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 16, 2008 © 2004 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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Organization Studies 25(9)

locally embedded nature of knowledge and the importance of face-to-face contact in its transfer. The next section discusses the burgeoning literature on the boundary object concept, following its commute from the sociology of science to management theory. The third section addresses the project management literature with its long-standing interest in tools and techniques and assesses how this tradition differs from the boundary objects discourse. It also raises some key issues regarding program organization and the political interests that complicate ‘intercommunal negotiation’. A further section presents the case study, including an explanation of the research method, and the sequence of development phases in the dynamics of the program. Finally we present the discussion and conclusions, analysing the implications of the study for theory on project management tools as boundary objects for intercommunal negotiation in dispersed programs. In the paper the term ‘project’ is used for a system of work activities for which there is a predefined outcome to deliver and an associated timeline with an end date. There is therefore the expectation of impermanence. The term ‘program’ is used to denote clusters of projects that are interdependent or associated in some way, such as financially, technically or organizationally.

The Dispersed Teamworking Literature

Most studies show that co-located work groups share knowledge and perform better than those where group members are dispersed (see Kiesler and Cummings 2002 for a review of studies in this area). Spatial proximity is argued to benefit organizational communication since it permits intense and ongoing face-to-face interactions. In spite of the increasing range of communications media available — telephone, email, videoconferencing, instant messaging, groupware, etc. — face-to-face is still regarded as the ‘richest’ form of interaction (e.g. Daft and Lengel 1986; Sproull and Kiesler 1986). Interacting in person generally solves problems and completes tasks faster than electronic-mediated communication (see DeSanctis and Monge 1999). There is a physiological experience of face-to-face contact between human beings: heart rates increase, performance and competitive instincts are aroused and people work harder to connect and empathize when facing a coworker (what has been called ‘rush’ or ‘buzz’; Storper and Venables 2003). Eye-to-eye contact engages attention, while physical touching such as handshakes or even embraces can build social bonds in some cultures — the ‘grouphug’ effect (Nardi and Whittaker 2002). In the absence of the effects of face-to-face interaction, relationships tend to flounder. Studies of team identification have shown that people working in dispersed teams are more likely to ‘drop’ members who are distant (Mortensen and Hinds 2002). This is the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ problem, manifested in comparative inattention to colleagues, lower effort and increased free riding at the expense of co-workers, which all lead to delays in work (Kiesler and Cummings 2002).


Sapsed & Salter: Postcards from the Edge

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Orlikowski’s (2002) study of a global product development team identifies a repertoire of practices, and activities that comprise the practices, and associates these with various types of knowing. Interacting face-to-face comprises activities such as gaining trust, respect, credibility, commitment, and building and sustaining social capital. Where dispersed teamworking permits face-to-face interaction through travel, as in the Orlikowski study, we might expect more effective results than where it is prohibited. This is also found in Maznevski and Chudoba’s (2000) study of three teams within a globally distributed organization. They show that effective virtual teams generate a rhythm of regular face-to-face interaction incidents, interspersed with less intensive interactions using other means of communication. Cramton (2001, 2002) highlights the importance of ‘mutual knowledge’ in dispersed teams demonstrating how frequent hazards of virtual work are implicated with the emergence of hostile coalitions, exacerbated by misunderstandings rooted in their remote location. Hazards include such problems as misinterpreting the meaning of ‘silence’ from remote partners. This is a welcome perspective since the challenges of global teamworking are not all rooted in a technical difficulty over knowledge transfer. While much of the literature identifies ‘good sense’ practices there is less attention to the challenges of teamworking when good sense practices are simply not adhered to; or when rhythms of meeting are impractical for financial or logistical reasons; or where the interaction between distinct communities agitates rather than integrates. Montoya-Weiss et al. (2001) address the issue of avoidance behaviour in dispersed teams which is manifested in evasiveness, non-participation or nonresponse. They show in a controlled experiment of students undertaking group assignments that temporal coordination devices, such as groupware like Lotus Notes, mitigate the negative effects of conflict avoidance (as well as overpliant accommodation behaviour). This automatically reveals initial positions and imposes intermediate tasks such as reviews and setting deadlines. Further questions remain about how a wider range of boundary objects and accessible means of communication than were available to the students in this 15-day study would affect their team behaviour, and how a more complex project than the students’ assignments, under real-world circumstances, would affect the tendencies to negotiate. The survey of the literature suggests that, first, there is a tendency for knowledge to be locally embedded and difficult to transfer over distance; second, face-to-face interaction appears to play a key role in facilitating the transfer of complex knowledge as well as building trust, commitment and social capital; thirdly and conversely, where there is no opportunity for face-to-face interaction, local coalitions tend to become hostile and distrust their remote partners. These issues are germane to the current interest in boundary objects.


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Boundary Objects, Communities of Practice and Balkanization

Communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991; Lave 1991; Brown and Duguid 1991, 2001) describes informal work-based organization that comprises an extramural social quality: ‘These groups of interdependent participants provide the work context within which members construct both shared identities and the social context that helps those identities to be shared’ (Brown and Duguid 2001: 202). Brown and Duguid warn that these communities naturally emerge around local work practice and so tend to reinforce ‘balkanization’ within the firm, yet extend to wider, dispersed networks of similar practitioners (Constant 1987). Within a formal organization the development of practice therefore creates epistemic differences between these balkanized communities, so that knowledge about good practice is enclosed. When there is a conscious push towards transferring these bundles of practice knowledge, they tend to ‘stick’ between the divisions of the firm, since the respective communities lack the shared work and social context. As Grabher (2002) puts it, acquiring the capability to successfully transfer and receive knowledge in a community of practice is as much a matter of socialization as of absorbing facts. Learning and gaining expertise is about becoming an insider. Brown and Duguid’s solution is ‘intercommunal negotiation’ of these differently practising groups, challenging and stretching each other’s assumptions about ways of working. The suggested tools to achieve this intercommunal negotiation are boundary objects; a concept borrowed from the sociology of science (Star and Griesemer 1989). Boundary objects are artefacts of practice that are agreed and shared between communities, yet ‘satisfy the informational requirements of each of them’ (Star and Griesemer 1989: 393). Brown and Duguid extend the notion to business tools, many of which are familiar in project environments — ‘shared documents, tools, business processes, objectives, schedules’ (2001: 209). Changes to practice affecting the boundary objects would disrupt the agreement between the subscribed communities and therefore necessitate negotiation between them. This negotiation therefore stimulates reconsideration of each community’s practices and possibly leads to the refreshing of them. This role and property of signalling and recording change in a community’s practice is emphasized by Brown and Duguid as a form of dynamic organizational coordination. It is counterposed to ‘the imposition of routines’, which is seen as ‘conventional organizational coordination’ (Brown and Duguid 2001: 209). The original introduction of the boundary object concept in Star and Griesemer’s (1989) study classifies four types of boundary object. The standardized forms category is seen as especially applicable to dispersed work groups, stressing common methods of information collection consistent over long distances. Objects with coincident boundaries have the same boundaries but different internal contents. The example given is the state of California; the different communities share the basic map of the state yet fill it with quite different contents. Ideal types are abstracted from all the bounded domains,



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and are consequently vague and locally adaptable. Repositories are modular ‘piles’ of objects that may be used without negotiation. Boundary objects enable collaborative work and promote the intercommunal negotiation described by Brown and Duguid. ‘Each social world has partial jurisdiction over the resources represented by that object, and mismatches caused by the overlap become problems for negotiation’ (Star and Griesemer 1989: 412). They are weakly structured in common use, yet strongly structured in individual site use (Star 1992). Fujimura (1992) has argued however that the looseness and ambiguity of boundary objects means that they cannot perform the role of establishing consensus across communities on matters such as scientific ‘fact’ (Fujimura’s quotation marks). Boundary objects may provide informational support but denote no intrinsic meaning. They are, in this sense, empty vessels to be filled with whatever is the preferred local beverage. Boundary objects facilitate the reading of alternative meanings by different groups (Henderson 1991). So the boundary object as an analytical tool has been borrowed from the sociology of science and is increasingly being applied to the management and organization fields. In addition to Brown and Duguid, the concept has been applied to accounting packages and tools that support change processes (Briers and Chua 2001) or serving as organizational memory (Cacciatori 2003), as well as for new product development (Carlile 2002, 2004; D’Adderio 2004) and in project management (Yakura 2002). Yakura’s (2002) analysis of project timelines as boundary objects argues that these are distinguished from other artefacts because of the closure element; Gantt charts, PERT charts, etc. not only provide a focus for interpretation and negotiation but also promise an ending, not necessarily a happy one, but a project task should be completed through using a timeline boundary object. Yakura stresses the visual nature of timelines or project charts, considered as vital to their success since local groups can assign verbal meanings of their own choosing to visual representations of time. Although not using the term ‘boundary object’, Lindkvist et al. (1998) had offered a similar analysis of project management timelines to Yakura. In particular, deadlines were argued to provide ‘a global attention focus and reflective activity related to inter-functional cooperation and compromise’; they are especially important for projects relying on a ‘coupling’ rather than ‘separating’ logic (Lindkvist et al. 1998: 938). Similarly to Brown and Duguid, Yakura and Lindkvist et al. see the timeline boundary object as an alternative to traditional hierarchical coordination, since it can be manipulated locally. It becomes clear in the literature that a boundary object stands or falls on its capacity to accommodate local ‘dialects’. D’Adderio’s (2004) study of software systems usage shows that product and database structures failed to perform as boundary objects for lack of flexibility to localization. Virtual prototyping technologies by contrast worked as effective boundary objects because of their plasticity through a virtuous translation cycle of local to ‘global’ and back to local. Tools are thereby ‘re-appropriated’ by local design groups, eliciting their tacit input into the codified product definition and enabling engineering benefits


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downstream. The translation routines between the global and local help to coordinate the diverse communities of practice. Carlile’s (2004) study also analyses prototyping technologies as boundary objects yet focuses more on their role in the negotiation of revisions. Carlile shows that the crucial property of such product visualization tools is their sensitivity to revisions suggested by actors involved. The tools can show precisely what the effects of the proposed changes would be and this impact can form the basis of negotiation between the actors. Visualization is a recurrent theme in the boundary objects literature. Flexibility of visual imagery is emphasized by Henderson (1991) who shows how sketches helped ‘verbally challenged’ design engineers to communicate. The importance of visual communication is also stressed in Olson et al.’s (2002) study of ‘radically’ co-located teams’ intensive use of flipcharts and whiteboards. Olson et al. suggest that current mediated technologies cannot fulfil the functions of the visual artefacts in their observed co-located teams. However, all this does not mean that those devices that do not ‘qualify’ as boundary objects are useless. They are limited with regard to facilitating the intercommunal sharing of knowledge in practice, yet they may serve the myriad other functions that require a degree of stabilization in work and consequently do not permit local adaptation. Fujimura (1992) uses the term ‘standardized packages’ for artefacts and devices that are intolerant of local tinkering, yet can handle collective work across social worlds through holding certain elements constant. This review of the boundary object literature has relevance for two key areas for extant theory. First, how does the concept of boundary object now being applied to the area of project management differ from the traditional views and functions of tools and devices in that field? Second, the raison d’etre for boundary objects — facilitating collaborative work and knowledge sharing between diverse people — raises the complex issues of organizational power and interdependence.

Project Management Tools and Controls

The boundary object literature has begun to address project management tools and offered them as an antidote to balkanization, but there has long been an interest in tools and techniques in the project management literature that at times has become disproportionate. In the 1970s the entire field of project management practice was seen (mistakenly) as a toolbox: ‘...a collection of organizational, schedule and cost-control tools — a largely middle-management, intra-organizational skill’ (Morris 1994: 104). The organizational aspects of project management received less attention than the tools themselves (Winch 1996). The renaissance in interest in project management in the 1980s again was fuelled by the introduction of new tools and techniques exploiting the capabilities of microcomputers and networking technology. However, in an important sense the emphasis of the boundary object literature is distinct from the customary functions associated with the core



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project management tools. PERT, Gantt charts, cost–benefit analysis, earned value analysis, critical path method (CPM) and work breakdown structures were more about managing resources, work packages, costs and time rather than facilitating collaboration between diverse groups of people in particular. Contrast the Yakura interpretation of timelines with Dean and Chaudhuri’s (1980) technical review of project scheduling techniques. As Packendorff (1995) says, general systems theory and the project management literature tends to view projects as ‘tools’ themselves, rather than ‘temporary organizations’. One effect of such a view is that the possibility of multiple motives among the actors involved in a project is not considered, since they are all supposed to be motivated by the project manager to fulfil their allocated tasks. However, where large complex projects have been studied empirically, balkanization and the clashing of interests have certainly surfaced. For example, Sapolsky’s (1972) study of the Polaris system development program showed a loose federation of technical branches and contractors and that the competition between them was a positive factor in the successful completion of the program. Studies such as Sapolsky’s raise issues of organizational structure, where authority and control are held in the political interdependencies of a large dispersed program. Sapolsky writes about using bureaucratic controls like special audits, detail reports, etc. as a means of limiting the autonomy of subordinates (Sapolsky 1972: 58), yet the most important function of the then innovative managerial techniques such as PERT, PERT/COST, reliability management index (RMI), the project management centre, weekly program review meetings and managerial graphics was effectively for external advocacy and image. The perceived innovativeness and competence in management of the Navy’s Special Projects Office was used as a means to promote and protect the program, a ‘protective veneer’ (Sapolsky 1972: 246). The success of the Polaris program was not so much due to these celebrated tools and techniques but partly attributable to the competition between the factions involved as well as the recognition of ultimate hierarchical control, in spite of decentralized coordination. The program manager held legitimate authority in Bacharach and Lawler’s (1980) terms. This raises the importance of power and dependency (Thompson 1967) between disparate groups in large programs. The nature of these interdependencies will surely affect the prospects for negotiation and knowledge integration between them. The power and control implications of organizational structures are not always considered in discussions of project management tools in the project management or boundary object literatures in spite of the obvious relevance to notions such as ‘hostile coalitions’ and ‘balkanization’. Through this review we have seen that the literatures on boundary objects, dispersed work and project organization have all arrived at the same set of project-oriented issues yet have tended to proceed in a balkanized manner themselves. Yet each has important insights to share on the question of intercommunal negotiation of knowledge in practice, as described by Brown and Duguid. Cross-fertilization between differentiated communities of practice would appear to be further complicated by spatial distribution. In highly


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dispersed projects the efficacy of project management tools as boundary objects may be tested, since it may be that boundary objects could compensate for the constrained level of interaction. In the context of the purported collaborative and intercommunal properties of project management tools as boundary objects, the question addressed in this paper is: how do they perform in internationally dispersed projects and programs? The next section sets out the case study.

The Case Study

This study is of a global dispersed program in a major computing corporation. For reasons of confidentiality we call the program, Tracker, and the company, CompCom. At core the program was a large-scale data warehouse integration aimed at improving the accuracy and accessibility of product information across the global CompCom organization. This involved developing systems and processes to collect and make available reliable data relating to CompCom’s installed products, such as failure rates and availability of service, and the quality of the components and materials constituting them. A key objective of the program is improving traceability of any defective material in the supply chain and in CompCom’s installed customer base. This would facilitate decision-making over whether to trigger processes such as stopping shipping and recalls. In addition, given better information the sales organization would be better placed to identify opportunities for upgrade and new product purchases. The Tracker program was a constellation of project teams, ‘a many-headed Hydra’ as one program manager described it. The program’s activities were organized into five ‘tracks’, largely representing the corporate functions of enterprise services, operations, global sales operation, the data quality management community, and a fifth track ensuring alignment across the others in information technology. This was the first major initiative in CompCom involving these different functions and there was a sense that this ‘partnership’ was intended as a vehicle to promote cross-functional, crosscommunity integrated working more generally across all geographies and lines of business. An important corollary of this was a so-called ‘federation’ organization structure, with four executive owners representing the sides of the business involved. Unlike previous large-scale projects that had one owner, this was intended to preclude the domination of one business community over another. As an important and far-reaching internal program, Tracker is an arena where a wide variety of interests and communities intersect. It was developing not only an artefactual ‘product’ in terms of systems, but also changing processes, practices and attitudes. In terms of geography the program’s activities span several locations across the US (predominantly Colorado, the San Francisco Bay area and the Boston area), Europe (predominantly Scotland, UK and Holland), and operations in Japan. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with 33 program managers and engineers spread across four of the program tracks and six locations. The



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modal duration of interview was one hour. Interviews were semi-structured but aimed to collect data on the broad categories of how the respondents fitted with the program and the other team members; what knowledge and experience they contributed and what they learned, what behaviours typically occurred and which tools were used. Interviewees were asked to draw mindmaps of their personal communications networks in order to assess where their social contacts were strongest. They were also asked to fill out a quantitative questionnaire aimed at assessing their choice of means of interaction, for example face-to-face meetings, telephone or e-mail. The number of questionnaire responses was not large enough for meaningful statistical analysis but supported the qualitative interviews in showing the perceived importance of different communications media and forms of contact in proportion to one another. The interviews were taped, transcribed, then coded and categorized in a process influenced by the procedures of Strauss and Corbin (1990). A report was then produced and presented to the industrial participants at a validation workshop, where recommendations were jointly arrived at. It is useful to present the case study as a time sequence to show how the program developed as regards the teamworking dynamics and use of program management tools. The following section then describes the activities for which face-to-face interaction were important, before a discussion of the program in a boundary object interpretation. Phase One: Early Meetings

The early stages of the program benefited from a series of face-to-face meetings, some involving several days where program managers from all geographic sites and lines of business were brought together to plan how the tracks of the project would work together. One of these, described as a ‘come to Jesus’ meeting, was instrumental in establishing program management processes and tools. One program manager reported ‘in 3 weeks we were forming, storming and straight into norming, and we’ve been performing ever since’. Several program managers speculated that if not for this meeting there would have been a poorer product and major slippage on the delivery schedule. An IT manager argued: ‘...if it wasn’t for that meeting on a regular basis when I think back, having not been able to have that face-to-face interaction for those several months, I don’t think we’d be anywhere near where we are now, because people were getting up on whiteboards, people were arguing points, they were arguing and committing, and disagreeing and committing and that’s OK and that’s healthy, and I think we’re so far past that point now people know each other, they’ve met each other, they’ve integrated with each other so I think that’s kind of an important fact.’

This quote illustrates three important points: first, that there was negotiation occurring at the meeting between the representatives of communities, showing that the program was indeed an effective vehicle for promoting intercommunal negotiation of the type recommended by Brown and Duguid (2001); second, that this negotiation in an iterative fashion enabled agreement


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and commitment as to how the program was going to play; third, the reference to the whiteboard is important as this IT manager had argued that without a co-located meeting it was difficult to carry out system-level design tasks; matching and comparing architectural designs. This collaborative visualizing is important and will be returned to. It was at these meetings that the program management tools and processes were agreed and represent the boundary objects of the study. The core tools were an integrated timeline, where every track’s phases and work packages were incorporated into the same system with interdependencies made clear. The second was a capability roadmap, which showed the functionality of the evolving system; which subsystems were to be completed by which time and where the critical pathways were. Third, processes were agreed on the phases of data definition, measurement and analysis as well as weekly meetings of the program management organization (PMO), larger forums within tracks, and status reporting. Fourth, status reporting, the timeline and roadmap were to be situated on a suite of program websites, containing all the program management information, presentations as well as tools to enable online status reporting and the like. This effort at alignment and integration of the various tracks’ activities and interests was important in perceiving the program as a whole. The program management tools were painstakingly agreed, disagreed and re-agreed over the initial meeting and subsequent occasions where they were monitored and updated. Documentation and interviews showed that at this stage the program was working coherently, and that the program management tools were crucial to this. The Travel Ban

During the program’s mid-phase, following the downturn in the high-tech economy, CompCom’s profitability suffered and as a consequence funding for travel was severely curtailed for much of the Tracker program. Some limited travel for executive owners and key track representatives was still permitted between the main US sites but international travel was effectively banned. The productive face-to-face meetings that characterized the early stages could not be maintained. The biggest challenges that Tracker team members referred to were difficulties in building and maintaining a meaningful teamworking relationship with their counterparts at remote locations. Some new project teams were formed and were challenged to build trust, understanding and effective communication with people whom they had never met. In particular, working in the same team yet in different time zones was an important problem for many. People in Scotland would have to tackle intensive teleconference calls with up to 25 people, at a time when they were tired at the end of their working day, while their American colleagues would be starting their day artificially early to accommodate the call — ‘bringing in the milk’, as one respondent put it. The isolation of remote sites seemed directly proportional to the amount of time zone overlap. Japanese sites with



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no overlap became ‘out of the loop’ from this stage and ceased to use the boundary objects. Local Breakaway Behaviour

The structure of the program entailed local groups situated at the major sites. With the reduction in travel and therefore opportunity for meeting face to face, local groups began to ‘go off in their own direction’. Program managers observed this type of behaviour and instituted routines, such as daily conference calls between sites, as well as splitting up tasks across sites to create interdependencies. In this way some cross-site teamwork was necessary to accomplish tasks, although the powerful local affiliations did not disappear. One interesting indication of this was the use of the ‘mute’ button in conference calls. The mute button was often used to allow local team members collected in the conference room to agree a group response, while excluding their remote colleagues from the discussion. While this behaviour was generally understood and accepted as standard practice, people were sensitive about this behaviour and felt the group experience was undermined. It clearly illustrates the power of locality in team decision-making. Although the program was aimed at standardizing tasks across sites, these were dealing with legacies of localized practice and data. One program manager commented: ‘...it’s different in [Scotland] than it is in [site in California], they make different products, they have different processes at the detail, and the detail is where it’s gonna kill ya. So, yeah, they have to run the analysis through [Scotland], they have to run the analysis for the other sites, because they have different people, different issues, different management, different processes at a very detailed level, and that’s where data gets entered, so in my situation it’s required.’

Particularly those working with the locations that were more remote from the corporate centre insisted on the idiosyncrasies of sites in the data they collected and the way they collected it. Much of the Tracker program’s mission and work was to identify these differences and move towards a more integrated global system and process. The differing local systems were a source of tension, as some team members felt that certain stages of the program management process were unnecessary and insensitive to local practice and circumstances. Gradually localized practice began to hold sway over global agreements symbolized by the boundary objects in the form of program management processes. One effect of this breakaway dynamic was that agreements made in conference calls or through e-mail were sometimes subordinated in favour of more informal and exclusive decisions made locally. The culture of informal discussion and decisive action had been a strength of the early growth period of Silicon Valley companies like CompCom. However, this way of working seemed not to scale up to global programs. One respondent explained:


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‘I call it “management by perpetual motion” which is great if you’re in the site where the perpetual motion is taking place. [In California] You’re part of this endless round of corridor conversations, which is great and probably gives a lot of energy ... but it’s a completely useless way of working. If you’re not part of that corridor conversation, if you’re 6000 miles away and 8 hours out of synch, you’re completely hosed.’

The exclusion of those working at the ‘peripheral’ sites from decisions was not malicious or premeditated, but more a matter of local convenience. As the manager put it, ‘They’re all in the same room, they’re eyeballing one another, they can all meet after the meeting but for you, it’s five o clock on a Friday night and you’re going off home. And so the dynamics are completely different, and often, as I say, decisions will be made, and things agreed to.’

The tactic of this peripheral site to combat its isolation was to further push the use of the program management tools and processes. A simple example is documenting and group e-mailing the decisions and actions agreed in a conference call so as to validate and confirm them. But the timeline, tools, roadmap and processes were increasingly neglected and avoided by those at the corporate centre. It was at this point that the artefacts began to fail as boundary objects in spite of the attempts to rescue them. Discussion and Conclusions Functional Communities and Interests

In addition to the geographical influence on coalition-forming, the communities of practice embedded in the different sides of the business further complicated the dynamics of the program. The conflicts between the organizations tended towards Brown and Duguid’s descriptions of ‘balkanization’, and the transfer of useful knowledge between the communities was certainly sticky. For some program managers the organization interests were a more significant factor than geography: ‘I think the impact of geos, to this point we haven’t had a lot of geocentric differences, it’s been mostly between the different organizations. The service side doesn’t care nearly so much what the supplier processes are, for example, but they should care because if you need spare parts to go and fix something the suppliers are typically the ones who are supplying the depots so you want to make sure they’ve got their processes in place so that you can get pretty quick access to your spare crews or whatever. But yeah, it’s all integrated but I don’t think geos are going to play a huge role.’

The geographic factor was interwoven with the organizational, however, since the services organization was predominantly at the Colorado site, while the operations core was in California, with other peripheral sites leaning to one more than the other. The federation style organization structure of the program, while serving to protect the communities from each other, had the effect of discouraging the groups from negotiating their way out of problems. Once the breakaway behaviour had begun with no opportunity for crosscommunity, cross-site meeting, conflicts increasingly were escalated up the



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local hierarchy. Senior managers from the respective tracks would liaise and resolve the problem, normally in a way that neither side suffered a disadvantage but often at the expense of the intercommunal learning and coordination that the Tracker program was intended to achieve. The divergent interests between the three organizations can be analysed through Thompson’s (1967) framework on interdependence and power. Since each organization had its own established domain and task environment, the interdependencies between them with regard to building and rolling out the Tracker system were somewhat artificial. There was a pooled interdependence in that each organization would lose some face if the initiative was to fail, yet their ‘core business’ remained unaffected. This is an important insight as to the limitations of boundary objects in general and project management tools as boundary objects in particular. Boundary objects necessarily are situated at the periphery of the implicated communities’ attentions; to be of greater importance to any one group may (probably would?) entail a corresponding debit to the others. In this case the negotiation over boundary objects is a zero sum game. The problem is precisely the marginal nature of boundary objects: while they are located at the boundaries of communities they might be more central to some than to others. The Tracker program example shows how teams at the remote sites used boundary objects to try to enforce inclusive and accountable discipline on a dispersed program. They were used to combat the informal and exclusive practices of their distant counterparts by attempting to impose boundary objects as controls over them. This was not accepted; the objects were avoided at the boundary and were subsequently discarded. The Tracker study shows that boundary objects tended to lapse as one community neglected and avoided reviewing them, and a boundary object that is lapsed on one side is lapsed altogether. To understand this non-participation it is helpful to consider the interests of each of the major organizations in the Tracker program. Operations

The production arm of the organization had been the engine of CompCom’s spectacular growth in its early years. It was the most established and confident of the functions and felt that the Tracker program was squarely within its domain. Operations is effectively at the start and the end of the chain, since faults in products are sent back for it to understand and debug. It also was acutely aware that the services organization had grown to a vastly greater headcount in recent years and was determined not to be dominated by what they perceived as a ‘... much more liberal set up’ in processes. One experienced manager from the operations side summed up the position: ‘What will the position be? That’s a hard one. My best answer would say [Ops] could own this thing and drive it to conclusion. We really don’t need those other divisions.’ There was no perceived interdependence on the other groups from the operations viewpoint and no perceived advantage gained from collaboration.


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Organization Studies 25(9) Services

The viewpoint from services was an enthusiasm for the technical elegance of the Tracker interface tool and recognition of Ops’ technical contribution and competence, and a willingness to learn from it. However there was a growing anxiety to flex its own creative solutions as well as to manage the program. ‘I’d say Enterprise Services would say something like, “We think the approach that operations is taking is wrong. We think the tool is great. The rest of the approach is wrong. We have a better way of managing the process.”’ Sales

The sales organization, with its privileged access to the customer base, felt least need for the Tracker system and what it was trying to achieve. Sales had an ambiguous relationship with Ops since both groups shared practices as sales provided equipment to customers, yet Sales also was the front line and first receiver of signals from customers regarding warranty and repair, etc. Their position is summarized by one respondent: ‘Why do I need a tool to tell me what I already know? ... We have that [knowledge] already too. We need to organize it and be disciplined around how we get it, but we don’t need operations to tell us how to do that.’ IT

The IT community was distributed throughout the other functions and there was genuine cross-fertilization and exchange of practice between IT representatives on both Ops and Services sides. Services had adopted Ops’ more rigid processes for tracking bug status, while Ops followed the functional specification written by Services. In this sub-domain the ambitions for Tracker as an intercommunal exchange were realized to the benefit of the overall organization. These interactions as described by interviewees were motivated as straightforward appreciation and adoption of a superior technique, rather than negotiation. This would probably be best characterized as a network of practice effect in Brown and Duguid’s (2001) terms, whereby IT professionals exchange knowledge in practice through fleeting exposure to techniques deployed outside their immediate community. These sketches of the perspectives of the distinct communities illustrate the marginal interests that each held in the program. Where there is no real reciprocal interdependency between the parties, the objects will tend to avoidance. It is precisely because of the marginal nature of boundary objects that they are limited in the extent to which they can promote intercommunal cross-fertilization. With an imposed project task environment such as Tracker, this problem is aggravated further because of the expectation of temporality and impermanence. As Bryman et al. suggest, it is not so much the temporary character of projects per se that is the most important feature distinguishing them from more permanent systems, but rather ‘the recognition and anticipation of transience’ (Bryman et al. 1987: 256). Commitment to intercommunal negotiation and knowledge sharing will suffer in an imposed



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project task environment where none of the participating communities is dependent on it for the maintenance or growth of their core task environment. Where there is an additional project layer of objectives and deadlines to meet, the tools as boundary objects become, quite literally, side issues. At the time of writing the program is at an advanced stage of its endgame — a roll-out of the systems through a series of summits, training events and meetings with stakeholders. Having related the development of the program in terms of its teamworking dynamics and use of program management tools, or rather its breakaway behaviour and avoidance of the tools, it becomes clear that the tools alone were insufficient as boundary objects. We have argued that the lack of dependency and interests was a major factor and that this is an intrinsic flaw in boundary objects. We now consider further possible factors for the failure of the tools to promote the sharing of knowledge in practice. Lack of Face-to-Face Interaction?

The visual artefacts — diagrams on whiteboards, timelines and modular roadmaps, etc. — seemed to function quite well as boundary objects when people were able to meet face to face in the way described by Henderson (1991) and Olson et al. (2002). But as Olson et al. suggest, visual aids seem to be less potent at a distance. The modular roadmaps and integrated timelines did seem to represent agreement for a period, but as the timelines went astray the willingness to revise was not present. Bearing in mind what we know from the literature on proximity and distance we suggest the lack of opportunity for face-to-face meeting was a major factor in the ‘lapsing’ of the program management tools as boundary objects. Mortensen and Hinds show that distant teams are more likely to drop and exclude team members at a distance, and this was the case with Tracker following the travel ban. Several respondents pointed to activities involving architectural and systems design thinking that were missing without face-to-face opportunities; as one program manager said: ‘Those face-to-face meetings are invaluable when you get on a whiteboard, you can’t do it on the phone, even with videoconference, you just can’t, you get on a whiteboard and you start “No, this is what I mean by part of a description and an integration of a hierarchy”, it’s like, how do you even explain that on the phone, until somebody gets up there and starts drawing dashes and the lines, things like that?’

It was during the early period of the Tracker program, when there were face-to-face meetings, that the boundary objects were prompted, negotiated and agreed. Since they appear to have a short ‘shelf life’, a regular pattern of face-to-face interaction would seem to be required to maintain them, as consistent with Maznevski and Chudoba’s face-to-face rhythm. Without face-to-face opportunities to reinforce them they tend to drift back to the boundaries.


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The Meaning of Boundary Objects and Authority

It is also the case that some boundary objects are more prone to neglect than others, because they are more ‘charged’ with meaningful action and less ambiguous. Project management tools of the type used on Tracker leave little room for interpretation. An online weekly status reporting tool, for example, offers essentially zero scope for negotiation over frequency of use and purpose. Timelines, as Yakura (2002) has argued, are a special case of boundary object endowed with particular powers of temporal coordination because they maintain pressures for, and suggest criteria for, task completion. Yakura’s examples of timelines are open to multiple interpretations and she argued that ‘... the important insight that emerges is that any set of groups can use timelines as a device for negotiating divergent views’ (Yakura 2002: 965). Yet, in the cases she cites, there are opportunities for face-to-face meetings as well as consultant–client relationships which can effect obligation to revise and use boundary objects. In Yakura’s cases the consultants’ tendencies to allow the timelines to slip and simply ignore them were checked by the client, who required that they adhere to them. Some bargaining ensued but the end result was that the boundary object was back in use. Yakura argues that boundary objects provide a basis for negotiation over interpretations of time, but this is far from providing the means to resolve them. There are other conditions, not only face-to-face contact, but also authority that have significant influence. Project timelines and in particular deadlines, as Lindkvist et al. have suggested, constitute ‘an unobtrusive form of control’ (1998: 949). Significantly, in their study of Ericsson engineers, the deadlines were publicly agreed at a series of regular meetings. Once again the significance of face-to-face meeting raises its conspicuous head, but it works in conjunction with the application of authority. Authority and control are implicit in certain temporal boundary objects, yet their implication affects the propensity to be used. A Gantt chart suggests how much work will be done by which time, by whom, with implications for how resources are deployed and over what duration. In the absence of clear authority, the less ambiguity and the less scope for negotiation, the greater likelihood that the boundary object is discarded by one or more local groups. In this case of Tracker there were not only meaning-charged boundary objects, but also shrinking opportunities for negotiation at face-to-face meetings as in the Lindkvist et al. study. This raises a difficult question of organizational priorities since in a complex, global program of communities a federation structure such as Tracker expects and has processes for conflict, which is sensible even if risky. Allowing for bargaining and politics within an organization acknowledges and legitimizes heterogeneity of goals in the organization and may undermine power structures (March and Simon 1958). The effect in Tracker was that no one community was able to dominate the others, yet the escalation process became almost an automatic response to conflict and frustrated the program’s ambitions for intercommunal integration.



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In Sapolsky’s study of the Polaris program, disagreements were escalated in the same way as Tracker which ensured that development alternatives were discussed. However, the Tracker program lacked a single executive owner to make the final call and so many of these escalated problems were not resolved. The locus of legitimate authority was ambiguous (Bacharach and Lawler 1980), hence informal influence tended to rule in the form of corridor management at the expense of the program management tools. Lack of Flexibility in the Tools?

As D’Adderio points out, local adaptation helps to promote knowledge transfer through the cycle of local to global to local. Similarly Carlile (2004) shows how flexibility of certain tools helps to negotiate through understanding sensitivity to proposed revisions. Yet in an information system roll-out of the Tracker type the transfer is really local to global without the opportunity for re-appropriation by the localities. The Tracker program was intended to help the company understand the true comparative costs of production and where problems arise in the supply chain. This was in a hard-nosed business context of rationalizing production sites rather than the creativity of new product development. The need and scope for flexibility in tools is a function of the task for which they are intended. It is no coincidence that the notion of boundary objects emerged from the study of scientific communities that are naturally inclined to share knowledge. This paper has illustrated that in high-pressure project-based business they are more limited in their effects. In a sense the boundary object literature may have forgotten the lessons learned previously by the project management field. Tools and objects may be useful as informational support for collaboration, and may symbolize and sustain agreement between communities. However, they are ‘high-maintenance’ items with a limited shelf life, have no independent potency for alignment and if conveying any meaningful knowledge exchange cannot be maintained at a geographical distance without legitimate authority or interdependence. Boundary objects, because of their marginal nature, are prone to be relegated to the edge of projects, which is after all where they belong. Note

We are grateful for the support of the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) grant no. GR/R54132/01. This paper has benefited from the comments of Lars Lindkvist, Bob DeFillippi, Jörg Sydow and three anonymous referees. Paul Carlile gave valuable feedback on a presentation of an earlier version. We would also like to acknowledge the contribution of numerous practitioners from the company in the study, who gave their time and insights so generously. The usual disclaimers apply.


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Jonathan Sapsed

Jonathan Sapsed is a Research Fellow in CENTRIM, the Centre for Research in Innovation Management, at the University of Brighton, where he has been working on teamworking and organizational knowledge since 1999. Previously Jonathan was a Research Fellow at SPRU, at the University of Sussex, where he received an MSc and a DPhil. He has been a researcher in Industrial Relations at the London School of Economics and a visiting scholar at the Haas Business School, University of California at Berkeley. Address: CENTRIM, University of Brighton, the Freeman Centre (University of Sussex campus), Falmer, Brighton, BN1 9QE, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

Ammon Salter

Ammon Salter is a Senior Lecturer in Technology and Innovation Management at the Tanaka Business School, Imperial College London. He received his DPhil degree from the University of Sussex. His current research interests include the management of innovation in project-based firms, the sources and determinants of innovative performance and university–industry links. Address: Tanaka Business School, Imperial College London, SW7 2AK, UK E-mail: [email protected]
