STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT IN MASS RAPID TRANSIT (MRT) PROJECTS IN SINGAPORE: PROJECT MANAGER'S PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

Stakeholder management has been considered to be important in construction by many scholars over the years. It is about relationships between an organisation and its stakeholders and it provides a platform for multiple stakeholders to exchange views, identify mutual goals and negotiate different interests and power arrangement in decision-making process and policy-forming activities. Stakeholder management is important to mitigate negative influences of stakeholders on the project and take advantage of opportunities to encourage stakeholder support of project goals.

Currently, there are no studies found that can determine if stakeholder management is being implemented in Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) projects in Singapore. Further, an effective and comprehensive framework is lacking to streamline the stakeholder management process in these projects to achieve project success. Therefore, the aim of this research is to investigate the status of stakeholder management in MRT projects in Singapore. Three research objectives are established under this aim. The objectives are to explore the current practices adopted by project managers to manage stakeholders in MRT projects, to evaluate the performance of these current practices and to identify project manager’s perception on stakeholder management in MRT projects.

The research methodology has been meticulously chosen in order to approach the dissertation appropriately. The qualitative research methodology has been adopted to understand the experiences, beliefs and views of the interviewees. Semi-structured interviews have been selected to mine the depth and detail information for this research. Moreover, a thorough desktop study has been conducted to collect information from existing resource. In addition, Liker scaling and mean value ranking method have been adopted to analyse the results from the interviews. Through a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the collected information, it is affirmed that the importance of stakeholder management is acknowledged in MRT projects but PMs should not stay satisfied with their current stakeholder management practices. They have to constantly engage in further improvements to enhance the quality of stakeholder management for future MRT projects.