BUS605: Strategic Project Management

Construction projects are complex undertakings that require competencies from a wide range of disciplines. Nowadays, single firms do not possess all the required competencies; a significant part of them must be acquired from several sources. Due to this complex nature, the project networks contain a large number of different stakeholders and a high level of interdependencies between them, which makes value creation and management a challenging issue.

The RPDMs are highlighted as a possibility of enhancing value co-creation, reducing costs, and improving quality in construction projects. In particular, it can help with early stakeholder involvement and creating integrated teams. This study concentrated on finding the stakeholders that should be involved in the project definition phase in renovation projects. The study suggests that the project stakeholders should be identified and involved as required during the project definition phase in order to bring together construction and design knowledge and skills. Although early stakeholder involvement is crucial, different stakeholders should be managed differently depending on their roles, liabilities, and salience in relation to the whole project.

From a practical perspective, a weakness of the study is that RPDM and early stakeholder involvement are relatively new concepts in construction. Thus, it is possible that the interviewees' perceptions of these concepts do not completely reflect reality, and therefore it is possible that these perceptions have skewed the results. Most likely, conducting interviews in another renovation project would help to improve the reliability of the results. Furthermore, the interviews were conducted before the case project started, and therefore we only have a good "guess" of who the stakeholders would be. Thus, it would be worth studying how and to what extent stakeholder involvement was really executed after the case project is completed.