A framework for stakeholder management in construction projects

Abstract

Stakeholder management has been considered to be important by many scholars in recent years. Operational knowledge of the practice of stakeholder management can be found in the literature, software packages, and current practice. Although there has been some success in areas such as the manufacturing industry, the construction industry still has a poor record of stakeholder management during the past decades. One reason for this is the lack of the establishment of a systematic framework for project stakeholder management. There are no routine functioning strategies, plans, methods or processes. The result is random stakeholder management. Although many initiatives, within the stakeholder management community, have made significant progress to improve the process, a formal framework has yet to be fully developed for construction projects. Previous studies have either concentrated on one stage of stakeholder management, or proposed several stages which are not coherent or not detailed enough in practice. One reason for the lack of the establishment of a formal stakeholder management framework could be the multiplicity of tasks and parties involved in a construction project. Such projects are subject to so many changes; hence although informal project stakeholder management is inadequate, the task of formalising a framework is difficult to complete. Project stakeholder management should provide the project team with adequate support for the selection of realistic options in the management of project stakeholders. Therefore, a formal approach should be synthesised and developed to improve the performance of stakeholder management process in construction projects. This research presents a framework that aims at being a systematic and generic reference for stakeholder management in the construction industry. The four main objectives of this research are: (1) to explore Critical Success Factors (CSFs) for stakeholder management, (2) to develop a systematic framework for stakeholder management, (3) to investigate practical approaches for stakeholder management, and (4) to validate and implement the proposed framework and approaches in practice, in construction projects. These objectives have been achieved through a literature review, interviews, questionnaire surveys, and action research conducted in Hong Kong and Australia, all targeting construction projects. Findings from the research are categorised into five areas: (1) the identification of 15 critical factors, which are important for the success of stakeholder management in construction projects; (2) the development of a systematic framework for stakeholder management, which consists of six activity groups (i.e. precondition, stakeholder identification, stakeholder assessment, decision making, action & evaluation, and continuous support); (3) the development of a typology of approaches for stakeholder management; (4) the evaluation of the systematic framework and the typology of approaches; and (5) the identification of the context specific nature of stakeholder management. The research has contributed to new knowledge and improved understanding of multi-stakeholders management in construction in at least five areas: 1. The collection of ranked and grouped CSFs can be used as an assessment tool to evaluate the performance of stakeholder management in the construction industry. 2. The results of the quantitative analysis of the 15 CSFs can help project managers become more aware of their responsibilities and the specific issues, which are important to the management of stakeholders in a particular project. 3. The typology of approaches and the systematic framework can be used as a reference for systematic consideration by project management teams in construction. 4. The context-specific nature of stakeholder management can be used as a guideline for practical stakeholder management in construction projects. 5. The demonstration of the usefulness of the ‘Social Network Analysis’ (SNA) technique, which can be used for the analysis of stakeholder interrelationships, contributes to the development of stakeholder management theory from a ‘network’ perspective.