Engagement strategies and challenges for adoption of stakeholder management approaches (SMA) in South Australian construction industry: Preliminary observations

While there is extensive research on stakeholder management (SM), there is a paucity of studies in relation to external stakeholders and in particular, South Australia. More so, the majority of the SM issues have focused on the significance of the internal stakeholder. In order to bridge that knowledge gap, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the perception of project management practitioners on the engagement strategies and challenges affecting the external stakeholders in adopting stakeholder management approaches (SMAs). A mixed methods approach was employed for data collection.A review of literature identified 21 engagement strategies and 9 challenges associated with deployment of SMAs. This comprised collection of primary preliminarily data from 19 construction professionals working with clients (private and public), consultants and contractor, and 5 semi-structured interviews within the South Australian construction industry. Quantitative data was subjected to descriptive statistics such as frequency and ranking analysis. Coding of the interview transcripts was used to identify recurring themes. From the descriptive statistics, the following were identified as most critical SMAs engagement strategies: (1) stakeholder identification; (2) well defined communication strategy and plan; (3) stakeholder expectations are understood; and (4) leadership.  The least critical were: (1) open information sharing; and (2) delegating responsibility to the stakeholder. The following three challenges were identified as critical: (1) conflicting agendas; (2) scare resources; and (3) power conflicts. In contrast, the least ranked challenges were: (1) subversive stakeholders; (2) passive involvement of stakeholders; and (3) low turn out to meetings.  In contrast, strategies identified from the interviews included identifying stakeholders as early as the design phase of the projects to harmonize the project performance standards with the stakeholder expectations. Despite the limited sample size, this study provides insights and raises awareness on the engagement strategies and challenges for the effective adoption of stakeholder management approaches.