Track: Project Management

Abstract

The literature indicates that inadequate communication with stakeholders and activities’ inherent uncertainties are some of the main causes of project failure. Therefore, two essential areas of project management are risk management and stakeholder engagement plan. In this matter, this study aims to evaluate how stakeholders affects project risks and how they relate to project success from the understanding of concepts and management tools. Four factors related to stakeholder management were defined as guides for the creation of eight scenarios, which resulted in different probabilities for three risk variables. Nine interviews with IT projects experts and specialists on project management education were conducted to obtain opinions on the proposed scenarios. The consistency of responses was verified by the Delphi method and by the coefficient of variation. The statistical method of Design of Experiments was applied, using Minitab® software, for the construction of the research instrument and for data analysis. Therefore, the effects of the factors ‘stakeholder register’, ‘stakeholder engagement’, ‘communication with stakeholders’, and ‘number of stakeholder groups’ on response variables ‘negative risk incidence’, ‘opportunities incidence’, and ‘development of contingency strategies’ were identified. Results show that the engagement and communication with stakeholders have a significant influence in the occurrence of negative risks, in the occurrence of opportunities and in the development of contingency strategies for the analyzed scenarios.