The purpose of this paper is to reflective on various personal experiences I have had in my professional career to date, where I was involved in different relationships between various stakeholders in the context of the construction and engineering industry as a construction project manager working for main contractors in particular in the Middle East from 2007 to 2009, overall I have approximately 10 years experience in stakeholder management within the construction industry in various roles.

I will be examining my personal experiences, actions / in actions and emotions and comparing these to academic literature on the topic of Stakeholder Management in the above contexts.

The reason why I have chosen this particular topic and set of experiences, is because I would like to be able to use my experiential learning and apply the suggested lessons for stakeholder relations, conclusion and recommendations to ensure the successful realisation of the project outcomes, that meets the needs and wants of the stakeholders involved during the project life cycle, in the future.

A general and broader definition of stakeholders is “any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of an organisation’s purpose” (Freeman 1984), the definition as defined be PMBOK, that I will be using in this paper is “individuals and organisations that are actively involved in the project or whose interest may be affected as a result of project execution or project completion”.

I have lived, worked and travelled extensively over the last 7 years living in the UK and UAE, while I was in the UAE I worked as a Construction Project Manager for two different construction companies, Dutco Balfour Beatty LLC and Cliff Creek Building Contracting LLC.

The projects I was involved in, were large and complex new build and fit-out fixed lump sum contracts which consisted of 3B + G + 11 + Roof + Upper Roof with a separate Services Block for RAK Bank at DSOA and RAK Bank – RAK was G + 9 + Roof including a cafeteria/kitchen and Upper Roof with a separate Services Block for DBB which involved various stakeholders, and it will be this experience I will be exploring.

For both companies I commenced my tenure part way through the construction phase of the project life cycle (refer below for a typical project life cycle) where the policies, procedures and systems where already in place, i.e. Project Management Plan, WH&S, Quality and Environmental Plan etc. which did not formalize the stakeholder management process.

Generally the stakeholder management process was less formally implemented within the companies I have worked for although they have an Integrated Management System (ISO9001, ISO14001, OHSAS18001) which address Quality, Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety, CSR policy, in particular DBB, but did not specifically address Stakeholder Management, and where more of a tick the box exercise i.e. paid lip services to the whole thing.

Generally in construction projects as was the case here we have overarching constraints of cost/budget, time/programme, scope and safety which must be satisfied regardless of any other consideration, two of the most restrictive ones are time and cost in fixed lump sum contracts.

Brief review of the personal experience (situation, events, feelings)

One experience was due to the confined space on site I as the project manager decided to use the vacant land adjacent to my site for storage and also to erect a tower crane on to aid with material handling, construction and to recover the program slippage.

The original programme was planned with two tower cranes however the Contracts Manager in his wisdom decided on one tower crane which was bigger than we actually required and was plagued with problems from the beginning, contributing to the programme slippage as both time and cost are two of the most important constraints on the construction project.

I had to balance the needs and wants’ (Aaltonen et al 2008) of the stakeholders to the project which included the Client, the clients representative and the design team plus my internal stakeholders i.e. my workforces down the line which was multicultural i.e. Indian, Pakistani, Chinese etc. and my bosses up the line, my subcontractors and suppliers, to try to deliver the project on time, to budget and meeting the clients expectations in terms of quality and safety etc., was a key objective of mind and my clients.

Other stakeholders where the neighbours as there was a housing estate right next to the site, the DSOA (Dubai Silicone Oasis Authority) which is the authority responsible for the project i.e. planning, approvals, statutory inspections etc., and of course the land owner of the vacant block adjacent to our site.

We had no choice but to use the vacant block for storage due to the confined space of the site and also to erect the second tower crane (if we had of known earlier in the project life cycle than we could of erected the tower crane on our site but due to the construction technique i.e. precast this was not possible at this late stage and would of had to go into the basement B3 as the precast would not support the loads).

We knew that the vacant land was not going to be built on until after our project had been completed as there was no planning approval through the authority, so we took the risk without contacting the land owner’s as there was tension between them who were also a bank from Egypt , and our owners/client and end users RAK Bank., as our client had tried to purchase that land.

We were eventually contacted by the vacant blocks owner’s representative and requested to clear the site and remove the tower crane. We then offered them (the Egyptian Bank) incentives (to rent the land temporarily / to provide them access and also use of our facilities to undertake there soil tests, provide them with design information and our soil reports to inform them of what the condition on their site was etc.) to allow us to use the land for another 3 months or so, however these were all rejected.

We also got request by the aut