Identifying powerful project stakeholders using workflow, communication and friendship social networks

Abstract

The social networks of IT projects are examined to determine whether powerful stakeholders are identifiable by their centrality in the communication, workflow and friendship networks. Traditional stakeholder models rely on the abilities of the project manager to correctly attribute certain characteristics to stakeholders and thereby determine who is powerful or important to the project. The purpose of the research is to provide an initial network-based stakeholder model that can be used to identify stakeholders by their social interactions in project teams.Stakeholder interactions and power ratings are collected from project team members that are part of three IT projects using social network tools and the resultant sociomatrices analysed to produce centrality measures for each stakeholder. The power ratings consisted of positional, personal and political power variables which were then entered into a regression analysis with nine centrality measures for degree, closeness and betweenness centrality. Overall, the results provided evidence that powerful stakeholders could be determined by their centrality in the various network types. Stakeholders with high personal power can be identified using the communications network. Those with high positional power can be identified using the workflow network and those with high political power can be identified using the friendship network.