ASSESSMENT OF STAKEHOLDER MANAGMENT PRACTICE IN ROAD CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS: THE CASE OF DEFENCE CONSTRUCTION ENTERPRISE.

Abstract

Projects stakeholder management in Defence Construction Enterprise face encounters from different groups with potentially conflicting needs and interests. The purpose of the study was to assess the current practices of stakeholder management in DCE road construction projects. The study were further identify and rank the most common factors that affect stakeholder management process in DCE road projects so as to propose mitigation measure as well. A questionnaire survey was carried out, the main respondents being, employee of DCE road project staff both at the head office and project level the questionnaires were sent via e-mails for project staff, some were distributed on person for head office staff. The study used stratified random sampling technique and the sample size was 168 out of 338 target population. One hundred sixty eight questionnaires were distributed out of this one hundred eighty questionnaires were received with 70.23% response rate. The data obtained through questionnaire has been analyzed quantitatively using descriptive statistics: frequency, mean and standard deviation through SPSS version 20 software and Relative Importance Index (RII) were used to identify and rank the factors that affect stakeholder management. The findings present that key stakeholders were not identified at the initial stage of the project and their interests were not analyzed at the required level. Lack of proper communication strategy is also identified as the major challenge to manage the project stakeholders. The study also revealed that the top three factors that affect stakeholder management process are setting common goal and objectives in the project, project manager managerial competence and assessing stakeholder attitude. Therefore, for proper implementation of stakeholders in a project, construction projects have to recruit project managers based on their competencies and delegate them a suitable degree of authority to improve the stakeholder management. Furthermore, all stakeholders should understand project goals and objectives, ensure strong communication, identify relevant stakeholders at project planning phase, institutionalized stakeholder management and ensure full commitment all stakeholders.