Summary of Article
The authors bring their readers’ attention to sustainability as addressed through the framework of project stakeholder management. The article analyzes and evaluates the approaches to managing stakeholders when implementing company strategic sustainability projects. The authors review available literature and use the pragmatic design science approach to develop practical tools to help project managers implement their tasks efficiently with sustainability prioritized. The study deepens the scope of stakeholder recognition. The orientation framework proposes a process model for stakeholder management and several practically applicable models and frameworks for stakeholder engagement, interest identification, and responsibility classification. Overall, Silvius and Schipper (2019) integrate the abundance of project stakeholder management concepts and frameworks into a comprehensive system of practical models that help implement sustainability efforts efficiently and effectively.
Reflection on the Article
Upon reading and summarizing the article, my understanding of project stakeholder management improved and became richer in terms of the practical vision of how stakeholders should be identified and managed. I think that the scholars who conducted the study succeeded in developing a well-balanced framework capable of meeting the requirements of project managers struggling with sustainability issues and stakeholder management. I agree with the article’s authors that sustainability problems and company goals are commonly ambiguous and difficult to attain. Thus, when the difficulty of stakeholder recognition, orientation, and engagement overlap with the complex project tasks, a manager might significantly benefit from a concise and multifaceted model that would incorporate all relevant concepts and frameworks into one comprehensive tool.
Another important insight that I managed to take from the article is that an efficient approach to stakeholder management is based on incorporating multiple determinants and measurements into one tool. For example, the authors propose using a tool that presents such project specifics as resources, processes, deliverables, and benefits to identify stakeholder level, type, and content of interest, expected contribution, and engagement strategy for each project domain.
References
Silvius, G., & Schipper, R. (2019). Planning project stakeholder engagement from a sustainable development perspective. Administrative Sciences, 9(2), 46. Web.