Planning for sustainable stakeholder engagement based on the assessment of conflicting interests in projects

The absence or lack of effective stakeholder engagement during project life cycle, especially at the earlier stages of planning and implementation often negatively impacts the expected performance of projects. These coupled consequences of the lack of contextual knowledge from the stakeholders as well as lack of their support in the field necessitates effective stakeholder engagement. However, this integration faces challenges such as limitations of project resources and conflicting interests of the stakeholders. In this sense, project resources can be allocated based on the priorities of the fields of conflicts to facilitate stakeholder engagement of the projects. The goal of this paper is to provide a framework to enhance effectiveness of the stakeholder engagement in projects by systematically ranking the potential conflicts while combining the viewpoints of stakeholders and project management team. For this purpose, we draw on stakeholder theory, value-based management, matrix-based dependency modeling, and Total Quality Management to develop a stakeholder engagement framework while considering fuzzy inputs for reflecting the ambiguities at the project life cycle. The proposed approach is then applied to plan stakeholder engagement in case of a green building project in Iran. Practically, application of the proposed framework facilitates stakeholder engagement for project managers in line with sustainable goals through early assessment of the fields of potential conflicts of interests.