28th International Congress on project Management "Project Management in the Digital Decade"

Many argue that the performance of large infrastructure projects is unsatisfactory: the wrong projects are selected, costs are underestimated, and benefits are overestimated. As infrastructure projects are formed in a complex environment with numerous interested parties there is a prevailing opinion that stakeholder engagement is the key factor to achieve success. Also, research shows that it is fundamentally unexplored area of construction project management. The goal of this research is to clarify how stakeholder engagement is implemented in practice. Empirical study is done through the interviews with the eight experts with vast practical experience in the management of the large infrastructure projects. Result showed that much of the crucial project risks are derived from the stakeholders and that engagement is a mixture of hard skills (e.g. procedures) and soft skills (e.g. coordination and communication). It is also detected that there is a support by experts to implement formal stakeholder management but there is a lack of knowledge. Practices used in the project management are still traditional and formal stakeholder engagement is very rare.