3. Early Stakeholder Involvement in a Renovation Project

A large part of the Finnish suburbs and apartment buildings that were built in the 1960s and 1970s are reaching the age that they need to be renovated in order to enhance their levels of housing and safety and also energy efficiency. The case project is a renovation project located in the city center of Joensuu in southeast Finland. The subject of the case study is a private housing company that contains two interconnected four-story buildings (19,600 cubic meters) built in 1971. One building serves as business offices (39 offices) and the other one as an apartment building (19 apartments).

So far, no major or comprehensive renovations have been done in these buildings; during the past ten years, only the windows and plumbing have been changed, and the heating system has been adjusted. However, the board of the housing company and many shareholders have expressed their interest in renovating the buildings and even build two additional floors on top of the buildings. In addition, the local city is striving to develop the city center, and thus, they have usually supported initiatives like the case project.

The main purpose of the empirical study was to find out who the stakeholders that should be involved in the project definition phase were and at what stage of the project definition. To achieve that purpose, the project stakeholders were identified, and their different roles and liabilities were explained. Furthermore, the main challenges of the renovation project were identified in order to see whether they had an impact on both the roles and the involvement of the stakeholders. The stakeholders were identified by using snowball sampling, while more accurate data was collected by interviewing the identified stakeholders.