Labour and external stakeholder management in construction projects

In the face of the unemployment crisis in South Africa, organisations involved in infrastructure projects are encouraged to engage local communities, to source any available skills as a form of labour on those projects, as an initiative to alleviate unemployment. This initiative presents numerous challenges in the coordination of resources and activities across organisations. Although this collaborative effort is for combating social problems in our local communities; it has resulted in costing organisations and government millions of Rands because of delays due to work stoppages and cost overruns in construction projects. Stakeholder management theory provides the grounding for this research. Although a framework already exists in project management for stakeholder management, but there is lack of research in the engagement of external stakeholders especially in local community projects and project managers struggle to make the stakeholder management processes relevant to this stakeholder. A qualitative study was undertaken, and the data was collected in the form of semi-structured interviews, to collect the views and perceptions from construction project managers involved in projects affected by local labour work stoppages. This study seeks to find out the real causes and effects of local labour work stoppages and finding efficient ways of resolving this. This research seeks to be a starting point for further research in work stoppages caused by business forums as it was concluded as a major cause during interviews with industry professionals. This research found that disruptions from business forums are one of the causes of work stoppages, which was not found in literature. This research concluded that government intervention is required to resolve this growing challenge. It has been concluded that the project stakeholder management processes are not applied in construction projects by project managers