Stakeholder management in complex projects: an empirical case study

Abstract

Although stakeholder management is considered as one of the main success factors for projects, limited research work has investigated the stakeholder management in complex project management. This work discusses two complex projects of different characteristics and answers to the research questions. The first project is Äänekoski bioproduct mill situated in Central Finland, and the second project is Sydney Metro West of Australia. The first case is analyzed using authentic public resources and the second case is analyzed using an interview from the project owner. Both the cases were studied using Martinsuo and Lehtonen’s complex project characteristics tool, GAPPS guidelines, Mitchell et al.’s stakeholder salience theory, Frooman’s stakeholder influence strategy, D’Herbemont and Cesar’s stakeholder characteristics and decision-making strategy of Aaltonen and Sivonen. This research work combines the analysis of these two cases projects and develops a framework for stakeholder management in complex projects. As both the cases are successful in their field, the framework developed from this work can be used further by the project managers to understand the management of the stakeholder in complex projects better. Despite that, this research work can be helpful for the project management researchers and general practitioners who are interested in developing new insights into stakeholder management and complex projects.