Practices for program scope definition and goal setting in change programs

Organizations establish change programs to renew their business and implement their strategy. Programs coordinate the activities and projects in the strategic change, to achieve the pursued benefits. As the success of programs is usually assessed in terms of achieving the program benefits, there is a need for better understanding on how the benefit expectations are converted to the program scope and goals. The purpose of this paper is to explore change program scope definition based on company strategies, and the conversion of scopes towards program goals. The aim is to present the practices the organizations use to define the scope in change programs and, thereby, develop new knowledge on the process of program scope definition. A qualitative study was performed in three programs involving change in information systems, processes and organizational structures in two technology companies. The results show that organizations specify program scopes based on assumptions about the status of the organization, and develop use case scenarios of the target state of processes to convert benefit expectations to goals. The findings contribute by specifying actions for scope definition and offering a more formal view to it in information system oriented organizational changes, when compared to behavioral organizational changes.