Interface Health and Workload between Stakeholders in Complex Capital Projects: Assessment, Visualization, and Interpretation Using SNA

Abstract

Collaboration, communication, and interactions between project stakeholders have a high impact on the overall success of complex capital projects. To manage these projects and their complex nature, new methods that can help to detect overloaded interfaces and identify unhealthy relationships between stakeholders are needed in addition to the existing traditional project management methods. Such methods are introduced in this study in a framework that integrates a novel point system, stakeholder interface networks for visualization, and social network analysis to gain and share insights into the health and workload of stakeholders’ interfaces. The framework was applied to a portfolio of projects in a power plant and a mass rapid transit project. Data was collected from numerous project participants for several project phases, and the efficacy of the framework for providing insight, facilitating diagnostics, and supporting project leadership discussions was validated through experts’ feedback. The findings reveal that the framework’s methods can provide adequate accuracy for assessing and visualizing workload and the health of stakeholder connections and that the framework has potential as an effective addition to the project management toolkit.