BUS605: Strategic Project Management

The possibilities of influencing project success are seen to be best during the early project stages, because decisions made early reduce unnecessary changes during later development stages and even the total life-cycle costs. According to several studies, early stakeholder involvement yields at least the following benefits.

(i) Early involvement leads to a lower likelihood of developing poor designs.
(ii) Early involvement in the design stage leads to a higher likelihood of a more effective design, improved construction operations, and less scrap.
(iii) Early knowledge about the end-users leads to higher customer satisfaction regarding the product's function and usage.
(iv) The more the stakeholders know about the customers' or end users' actual usage of the products, the more efficient the stakeholders' operations are in terms of meeting the buyer's needs and purposes.
(v) The more the stakeholders know about the exact objectives of the design specifications, the more the stakeholders are able to meet or revise those specifications by adjusting their capabilities.
(vi) Early involvement allows room for creative solutions and the intensive exchange of ideas.
(vii) Early involvement leads to procedures that are synchronized and run in phases.

There are few examples of applying early stakeholder involvement to construction projects, whereas in the manufacturing industry, the different aspects of the stakeholders of early product development have been addressed by utilizing the Design for X (DfX) methodology. DfX is a structured approach to systematically addressing early product development, functional integration, and enabling capability creation. In DfX, the X stands for an aspect or a stakeholder under consideration, such as manufacturing, environment, maintenance, supply chain, and cost. Basically, the same Xs exist in the construction industry as well, but the names can be different. Therefore, the DfX analogy remains the same, and it is essential to take stakeholders and their opinions into account in the construction industry, just like in product development.