Future Opportunities for Stakeholder Management in Construction Projects

One of the main factors determining project success is the satisfaction of its stakeholders, although it is rarely mentioned in scientific research. When the stakeholder's needs are not met, there can be significant downfalls such as delays in delivery times, extra costs, and unsuccessful project outcomes. By improving stakeholder management, project success can be increased. There still is a lack of attention and research in this area and the limited research in this area is fragmented. The research usually focuses on case studies of a specific project by mapping its stakeholders or discussing the method of stakeholder management used in the project. Also, it has been observed that current technologies and opportunities for digitalization are not being actively used to improve stakeholder management. This study aims to bring together all this fragmented scientific research by analyzing and categorizing existing methods, defining current barriers, and making future suggestions for a holistic view of stakeholder management since unsatisfactory stakeholder management can negatively affect projects and result in project failures. With this purpose in mind, this paper initially creates a summary of current methods used in stakeholder management and discusses their limitations. In the second portion of this paper, future trends in stakeholder management are discussed. Improving stakeholder management would result in more successful projects, this could only be done by keeping up with up-to-date methodologies, following future trends, and taking advantage of current technologies which would be discussed in more detail in this paper.