Engaging Stakeholders Early

4. Discussion

Typically, construction project deliveries today are mostly optimized for the least exposure to each player in the process, and thus, the projects are "produced" in silos of design, construction, operation, and maintenance with a large number of players, customers, and suppliers who exhibit low interdependency and integration. This activity inevitably harms the outcome and consumes vast resources with a lot of waste. Ultimately, the customers bear the brunt of waste, such as construction errors, broken schedules, and budget overruns, as well as high long-term operational and maintenance costs.

The theoretical and empirical findings revealed that renovation projects contain many challenges. It may be possible that those challenges even emphasize the typical challenges of the construction industry. Thus, it is argued that shifting the project delivery methods towards RPDMs and integrated teams through early stakeholder integration would be reasonable. The project stakeholders' expertise is rarely a problem; the major problem is the ability to involve the right stakeholders and coordinate their diverse potential and know-how. Due to the low interdependency and integration of the stakeholders, typically, the stakeholders define the objectives that are consistent with their own interests. In reality, the customer's requirements and constraints should be figured out first, after which the constraints of the other stakeholders are mapped. Finally, the designers and contractors should endeavor to find a solution that best meets the requirements as well as the constraints.

There are no comprehensive practices for completing and maximizing value in complex renovation projects. However, customers have increasingly started to demand the best possible value from the stakeholders, and there is a realization that the lowest price does not achieve that task. The customers are seeking the freedom of choice to interact with firms and define choices in a manner that reflects their view of value. Hence, the construction industry can no longer afford to view customers and other stakeholders as the passive recipients of products, services, and deliveries. There should be more emphasis on value-adding activities within the value streams and considering the whole lifecycle of the end product; therefore, the construction industry would benefit from stakeholder-led processes.

In value streams, firms no longer solely create value, and therefore, they want to insert themselves into the chain and open up the possibility of contributing to value creation with their own activities. According to Ramaswamy and Gouillart, value cocreation is something more than listening and feedback; it is about redefining the process and methods and redefining how organizations involve stakeholders by bringing them into the value stream and value creation process and involving them in it. Basically, this means that the mindset shifts from a traditional "subsystem delivery" to "system ensemble and experience co-creation".

If it is desired that the mindset and practices change towards value co-operation, early stakeholder involvement and integration play a central role. However, stakeholder integration and involvement are not always easy, and thus, several studies have been carried out in order to find out what the critical success factors are. Communication among all involved parties is essential, because a stakeholder's increased knowledge is more likely to result in more interaction, sharing, and involvement on the part of the stakeholder. Other success factors include ensuring that the partners contribute as expected, creating the perception of equal benefits among the partners, and building trust between the partners.

In addition, several studies have emphasized that there might be a need for contractual agreements in collaboration with stakeholders. Especially this concerns the construction projects where are typically operated within the agreements. Although agreements are frequently considered as an essential part of projects, the tight definition of the legal boundaries of the agreement is not sufficient to obtain the desired outcome. On the other hand, the RPDM agreements have been developed with this issue in mind. However, the results of the study showed that in small-scale projects, the stakeholders, especially the customers, were not willing to make agreements that were too binding in the project definition phase; they wanted an agreement that was more like a letter of intent.