The Project Management and Engagement Strategy Spectrum: An Empirical Exploration
Paper Title:
The Project Stakeholder Management and Engagement Strategy Spectrum: An Empirical Exploration
Abstract:
Project stakeholders are now universally acknowledged as a prime critical success factors on every complex project. Consequently – and especially for a project’s key decision-makers – a profound knowledge of practical strategies and methods which can be applied to effectively and efficiently manage and engage their stakeholders, both primary and secondary, is essential. Doing so can reduce threats, in particular severe and existential ones, to their projects on the one hand while helping the projects benefit significantly from the sustained support, encouragement and goodwill of their stakeholders on the other.
The experience with large projects in the construction and civil infrastructure development field shows that in general much ignorance currently still prevails about how stakeholders should be managed and engaged appropriately. The numerous observed and often avoidable conflicts which arise and linger on over time between projects and their stakeholders and the frequent and surprising lack of proactive stakeholder management and engagement on many projects is clearly indicative of this knowledge deficiency in practitioner circles. This deficiency appears to have been rarely addressed systematically and in-depth in the project stakeholder literature.
Through an analysis of extensive available documentation collected from diverse sources in the public domain on over fifty on-going and completed high-profile construction and civil infrastructure development projects across the globe, the authors have explored a broad spectrum of stakeholder management and engagement strategies. In particular, the authors have focused their attention on innovative and effective strategies designed to maximize benefit for the projects and their stakeholders and to thus ensure attainment of a ‘win-win’ situation for them both. Through their research, the authors hope to motivate and assist key project decision-makers to significantly improve the quality of their interaction with their stakeholders through pursuit of sound and tested strategies which serve the interests of their own projects while simultaneously ensuring that the legitimate interests of their stakeholders are duly taken into consideration.
