Conclusions

Although the stakeholder mapping approach presented here has been developed in the context of major building and civil engineering projects, its application is much wider. Compromising the interests of powerful stakeholders is essential for the effective definition of any project mission, and this tool has a role to play in achieving that definition. The recent experience in the United Kingdom (UK) of major information technology projects in the private and public sectors shows that the failure to manage stakeholders leads to unclear definition of the project mission, abandonment of the project, and a large waste of resources. The stakeholder mapping approach presented here provides the basis for an effective stakeholder management strategy, as it identifies what sort of communications strategies different stakeholders might accept, and the sorts of compromises that would have to be made to ensure their commitment to the project.

Our analysis has been unable to do full justice to the richness of the maps due to length considerations. For the further development of this stakeholder mapping methodology, we would suggest that research should focus on the following areas:

• Further research is required into methods for manipulating the power/interest matrix in favor of any particular stakeholder—Johnson and Scholes (1999, 2002) provide some indications of ways of doing this. This will typically be done by the project manager acting for one of the key players, but the mapping technique is equally open to use by opponents of the project.

• A stakeholder approach implies that the criteria for project success are themselves contestable. What is considered success for one stakeholder may be failure for another. For instance, the banks and the contractors (Transmanche-Link) had very different views of price on the Channel fixed link (Winch 1996), stemming from their different business cultures. Banks bid high and trim their margins; contractors bid low and recoup their costs. The 69 percent budget overrun on the project shows that the contractors' view of price prevailed in the long term—the project was a success from their point of view, but not from that of the banks. Better understanding of these dynamics is required.

• Greater understanding is required of the shifting nature of the stakeholder map through time. This is particularly important if projects are phased and stakeholders learn from their experiences in the earlier phases. Changes in stakeholders—such as takeovers of client firms or changes in government—can also lead to changes in the project mission, or even outright cancellation. One of the most important tasks of the project manager is to sink in enough assets so that any shift in the power/interest matrix does not lead to project cancellation due to sheer momentum—"getting the concrete on the table", in the words of the project manager of the Storebaelt project (Bonke 1998). SOLIDERE appears to have achieved this, with the new prime minister shifting towards a more conciliatory approach with the realization that changing its mission would be too disruptive at this stage. On Montserrat, stakeholder dissatisfaction with the outcome of each stage led to redefinition of the artifact within the overall mission.