WORK CONTEXT FROM AN INDIVIDUAL EMPLOYEE’S PERSPECTIVE

What does life on the boundaries look like from an individual employee’s perspective?

Based on the interviews I have gathered in Figure 21 factors or parameters that can change and in some way or other affect what one individual is doing and how. This picture also aptly describes the boundaries that individual people have in their job roles. At least some of these parameters are on the move at a certain point in time.

5. See McIsaac & Morey (1998) for the “culture of engineering” that motivates R&D workers.

Figure 21. Factors that can change and cause changes in people’s work

Figure 21 also shows the parameters that people used when describing their work and job role. This is by no means meant to be an exhaustive list and not every interviewee used all these parameters. It also needs to be borne in mind that this picture has been drawn from individuals’ perspectives. If it was drawn from the perspective of the or-ganisation, project or a product, the picture would be different. Figure 21 shows what can change in individual people’s environment. It actually also shows the interfaces⁶ or boundaries that people have around them and that they need to cross when needed.

Within all boxes, especially in the inner circle, there are people who are involved and with whom the individuals need to collaborate. In addition to these, one needs to cross political,geographical, time zone, cultural, social and political boundaries. Ex-amples of changes that the interviewees described were related e.g. to technology and product generations (from 2G to 3G), to processes (from the waterfall development process to the agile/incremental process) and to the generic tools (the introduction and implementation of the new virtual meeting system).

The job role contains what a person is actually doing at a certain point in time.

He/she needs certain competencies and skills to do the work. There are many param-6. Complex SW and/or HW products have their own architecture; architectural interfaces and the regularities within the

architecture is a completely different thing.

eters in people’s work that can change and cause changes to one’s job role. Most R &

D people’s work can be described by attaching certain labels to it: product, process phase (e.g. system design, implementation, testing or integration and verifi cation), domain (e.g. SW, HW) or function (e.g. marketing, customer documentation). The organisation is also usually built around these parameters. Whether there is a matrix organisation with separate line and/or project organisations varies over time and in different parts of the whole organisation. Some people work more “globally” concentrating, for example, on global business development. Some work more “locally” belonging for example to a team developing one SW sub-system for a certain product. Figure 21 does not intend to separate matrix and project organisations; structural factors are in place in both.

In a networked type of environment the number of managers “giving guidance” may be high in all kinds of organisational setups. “So about this matrix organisation, so many people have several bosses, it must be close to ten, if we start to count all those giving guidance, which is already perhaps too many.”

The structural factors are more often related to how things are organised, many of these being related to organisational structures. The integral factors are more related to what is being done, i.e. products and what needs to be done inside the product.

Ways of organising like process phases or projects are in between the structural and integral sides. In the following extract a participant in the Council describes how the Tampere Networks Council is not tied to a certain organisational structure. It is tied to the location but the participant selection is actually based on the products, i.e. the integral side (e.g. radio access).

The council actually isn’t tied to the organisation. It is only a bunch of people that have been gathered from different areas, you know, gathered from different areas to tell about things from the employee point of view. What I am after here is that does it really matter which organisation there is behind? It should actually be so that the organisation does not matter. For example, here and now, when our X group dissolves, so the radio access side, so it is still there, they wouldn’t disappear anywhere from the booth next door. (Engineer, Female)

In my opinion the [organisational changes] are not so essential. So that it doesn’t affect your project if your boss changes, so that you just go on doing the same work. I don’t know, you have kind of grown numb with them, so that you don’t take them like that any more, whereas the fi rst organisational change was just shattering. But it doesn’t, you know, feel anything. They don’t touch you… It’s just a kind of external, external from work, so that it doesn’t affect your work… So now we are in the X business area… So, the business area setup has also changed many times; it used to be the business area Y and it was driven down and then we ended up in Z, from site A the people were sacked, and our Product Manager left from there, and there has been quite a lot of people changes, so that defi nitely affects…

Yes, in a way, the line organisational changes don’t affect at any level, but this kind a thing yes, business area related changes do affect. (Engineer, Female)

It doesn’t matter so much at the end of the day, anyway this is, when I myself think kind of project centrically, so that these line issues are quite secondary, at the end of the day.

(Project Manager, Male)

So, it is this line bunch and then there is this one’s own responsibility area… I don’t know what it would be all about if you were in a project and people would change in a couple of months and then you would be in another project and people would again change in a couple of months. It is good that you have your own core group, those certain people.

(Engineer, Male)

Work is mostly organised around projects so that the follow-up of their progress and budget is easier. Both product development and improvement efforts (for example process improvement projects or other internal improvement projects) are organised in the form of projects. People can be part of one project or several projects. The skills needed in a job role also vary according to the tools and methods that constantly develop and change.⁷ Learning new tool specifi c skills is increasingly regarded as a business-as-usual matter in technology intensive R & D work and “no one makes a fuss over having to need to learn new tools.” Tool development and incremental proc-esses have further enhanced the erosion of work strictly split by process phase; design, development and testing are done more and more in parallel. Certain process phases include in-between type of tasks, for example unit/module testing has traditionally been on the boundary of design and testing/integration process phases. There were clearly people who identifi ed themselves to the project organisation and those who identifi ed themselves with the line organisation.

8.1.5 ORGANISATIONAL CHANGE AS A PREVALENT FEATURE