A comprehensive method for identifying key stakeholders in infrastructure civil projects of the country (Case study: Part B2 of Tehran-North Highway Project, Iran)

Document Type : Research Article

Authors

1 Construction & Project Management Department, Faculty of Architecture, University of Tehran, Tehran, IRAN.

2 Masters student, Department of Engineering /Islamic Azad University, Shiraz Branch

Abstract

Several methods have been proposed to identify the projects’ stakeholders. However, project managers are still confronting severe challenges in selecting an appropriate stakeholders’ identification method while meeting their expectations in the project. This research is mainly aimed to present a comprehensive method to identify stakeholders in the infrastructure projects of the country by applying the Meta Synthesis Method in part B2 of the Tehran-North Highway project. In this study, a systematic investigation was initially carried out regarding the management of stakeholders. Then, using the Meta Synthesis Method, all the stakeholder identification models were examined and the important components were extracted. By combining the different extracted components, a comprehensive method was proposed as a thorough and functional strategy for the managers to identify the key stakeholders in the infrastructure projects. This model consists of five main components including the project inputs, environmental factors of the project, projects’contradictions, tools for stakeholders’ identification, and tools for stakeholders’classification, which simplify the stakeholders’ identification process in projects. Ultimately, to evaluate the presented method, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the senior executive managers of part B2 of the Tehran-North Highway project. The obtained data from interviews were codified by axial coding and the coded data were then analyzed. The results reveal that utilizing the proposed method in the target project of this study leads to the identification of 45 more stakeholders in addition to the 23 stakeholders previously identified based on conventional methods.

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