Developing An Effective Stakeholder Engagement Plan For Sydney Airport Parallel Runway Project

Hint, you might discuss how stakeholder engagement on the actual project (back in the last century) compares with what you are now proposing!

Guiding information:

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Stakeholder Engagement Plan importance for the development of Sydney Airport Parallel Runway Project

The perspective of the stakeholders about a particular project is essential for positive outcome and successful outcome. Stakeholder engagement is the method of interacting with the project stakeholders in order to convince them and their advocates about the benefit of the project (Andriofet al. 2017). However, stakeholder engagement is quite different from stakeholder management and it influences the variety of outcomes through relationship building, communication, consultation, negotiation and compromise. Stakeholder engagement plan is the list of activities along with timelines developed systematically to provide the stakeholders with relevant information from time to time so that success of the project assured (Cascettaet al.2015). Communication is a key to achieving success in major projects and the report has aimed to provide an effective stakeholder engagement plan for developing a parallel runway in Sydney Airport. The runway had already been developed two decades back but the report has made an assumption that runway would be developed in the upcoming year and the stakeholder engagement plan has developed based on the current requirement. Therefore, the current standards, legislations, knowledge, input and current reaction of the stakeholders will be taken into account while developing the project. The stakeholder breakdown will be addressed based on the current requirements and will provide a comparative analysis of the project stakeholder requirement changes in the past decades.

The stakeholder engagement plan is important for development of the Sydney Airport Parallel Runway Project.  Sydney airport is one of the international airports in the country and acts a gateway for both domestic and international flights.  The parallel runway project was executed in the 19^th century but even in the present day the development of a parallel runway has to take various factors in consideration before proceeding with the project (Averyand Balakrishnan2015).  In the project almost two decades back, environmental concerns were one of the biggest issues and challenges that had to be taken into account while developing the parallel runway.  There has been strong growth over the last decade and the airline industry has grown significantly.

The major challenges faced by the organizations in such projects are environmental, efficiency, capacity and safety challenges.  The runway has to be developed based on the current requirement but the future requirements will also have to be taken into consideration while making investments. This investment will include updates in equipment, infrastructure and effective management of human resources for performing air traffic management functions.  The airspace is huge and it covers almost 11% of the overall airspace so improvement in surveillance, remotely piloted aircraft systems, environmental impacts, workforce capability, infrastructure and technology are key challenges and issues in the modern development of runways (Tangri2018). The safety requirement based on the legislations has changed from the past two decades where safety of the passsengers is given utmost priority. Therefore, abiding by the regulations of ICAO SARPs, harmonization of Civil-military ATM, recruitment and retention of effective workforce and environmental impact management are major issues (Tangri 2018).  These factors will have to be taken into consideration while developing a new parallel runway as environmental conditions have changed drastically in the past two decades.

Major challenges faced by organizations during the project

As stated by Rahmanet al.(2017), stakeholder engagement is a process of developing a two communication between the decision makers and stakeholders to exchange information regarding the project. This also facilitates in providing a better understanding of the issues addressed by the policy makers while addressing a particular project (Barrett, Oborn and Orlikowski 2016). The policy direction is better achieved using engagement plan and news methods of initiating a plan. Stakeholder engagement plan is one of the ways of maintaining transparency and take inputs from the stakeholders to get better results. The diverse range of issues can be identified using the engagement strategies and will provide the stakeholders the idea about the issues that will have to overcome and managed (Zavyalovaet al.2016). Projects will consist of both external and internal stakeholders. The internal stakeholders are personnel that are directly linked to the project and serving the organizations. The internal stakeholders include board members, staff members, former board members, investors, employees, managers and owners.  External Stakeholders are the ones that are not directly linked to the project but the operation of the project impacts them (Barrett, Oborn and Orlikowski 2016). The external stakeholders will consist of community partners, clients, suppliers, government and society.

The nature of working relationship between the project committee and the stakeholders will facilitate in establishing the requirements, constraints, deliverables, out of scope and milestones (Aragonés-Beltrán,García-Melón and Montesinos-Valera2017). The budget allocation and resources available for a particular project is also effective set based set on the stakeholder criteria. The information of the different phases assists in changing requirement if required and solve the issue faced during the project. However, the stakeholders’ identification process starts with stakeholder analysis where all the required stakeholders are initially identify the all the stakeholder with the project group and the leader. This is the most effective way of identifying all the stakeholders that will be affected by the project during the execution and launch of the project (Aragonés-Beltrán,García-Melón and Montesinos-Valera2017). This facilities in effective identification of the internal and external stakeholders in the project and measures can be developed based on this analysis process to align the involvement and the interest of the stakeholders (Barrett, Oborn and Orlikowski 2016). This is generally conducted by using stakeholder mapping which has been discussed in the following sections.

The stakeholders in the current project have been identified and the stakeholder design for the runway has been identified. The internal and external stakeholders in the project have been identified.

Internal and external stakeholders

Internal Stakeholders

The internal stakeholders in the project are as follows:

• Project board, project manager: The project board and project manager are the key internal stakeholders deciding on the requirements and budget of the project.
• Airport runway construction authority

1. Engineering: Engineers are one of the key internal stakeholders in the project and will consist of civil engineers, electrical engineers and electronic engineers. These engineers will develop the design of the runway based on the requirement of the stakeholders decided by the project board and manager (Karanikas 2018).
2. Infrastructure- The responsibilities of the infrastructure engineer includes architect, supervising and participating in technology and development implementation (Mordecai, Orhof and Dori 2018).

iii. Construction- The construction manager has the responsibility of overseeing the major aspects of the project that includes managing, working with other construction workers along with planning and budgeting process (Mata?Lima et al. 2016).

1. Procurement- The procurement managers are responsible for purchasing necessary goods and services needed in the airport runway development process.
2. Development and Master planning

1) Consultant- The consultant personnel has the responsibility of advising the management regarding certain compliance with policies and procedures.

2) Design Build Contractors- The personnel has the responsibility of delivering project within which the design and construction services are contracted by a particular design builder.

• Airport management authority

1. Ground Services- These stakeholders perform vita duties to make sure safety off airline passengers along with maintaining plane and runway between flights (Mordecai, Orhof and Dori 2018).
2. Governmental Operation Authorities  

1) Police- Airport police units have a major role in carrying out law enforcement functions in cse of airport emergency.

2) Air carrier- This stakeholder group has responsibilities of flight deck checking, maintaining air navigators (Bows-Larkin 2015).

3) Customs- This stakeholder group is responsible for loading export goods needed for airport runway project.

iii. Airport Operation- This stakeholder group has the responsibility of managing the operations of local airline company, supervising duty fees compliance and abiding by rules set by the funding government in the runway project.

Mapping of Stakeholders

Ferretti (2016) stated that visual representation or pictorial depiction of the stakeholder analysis is represented by stakeholder mapping.  This constitutes organizing the people as per the key criteria for effective management of the stakeholders during the project.  The key criteria of stakeholder mapping are financial stake, interest, influence, emotional stake and others. It is essential to include all the stakeholders even those that are on the periphery for effective stakeholder engagement. The mapping of the stakeholders is broken into four phases to determine the key list of stakeholders from the overall stakeholder spectrum and they are identifying, analysing, mapping and prioritizing (Krupaet al. 2018).  The project process quality depends on the knowledge of the participants and so it is essential to gather a group that is cross functional in nature consisting of internal participants to contribute to the project. This facilities in identifying the external sources that may have the required knowledge or perspective on the issues for valid inputs.

The first step of the process is identification of the key stakeholders which will be dependent on the current engagement objectives, impacts and purpose of the project. This means that the stakeholder list would be dynamic and would evolve based on change in the surrounding environment (García-Nietoet al. 2015). The next step is analysis of the stakeholders to understand their perspective and relevance to the project in order to identify the usefulness of these stakeholders in addressing the issues in the project. The analysis is executed based on criteria such as contribution, willingness to engage, legitimacy, involvement necessity and influence (Fradkin, et al.2016). The next step in the process is mapping of the stakeholders based on the analysis which is used to determine the most useful stakeholders in the engagement process. The final step of the mapping process is prioritizing the stakeholders based on their level of importance. This is because of the fact that every stakeholder does not necessarily needed to be engaged at all times and with same amount of engagement. Therefore, the strategic perspective facilitates in conserving both money and time while engaging the project.

Stakeholder mapping

Table 1: Stakeholder mapping and analysis

Source: (As created by Author)

The importance of stakeholder engagement plan and the reason of effectively engaging the stakeholders have to be analysed to understand its significance in modern day project management. The most aspect of a project is defining the scope of the project and aligning it with the needs of the stakeholders. The nature of working relationship between the project committee and the stakeholders will facilitate in establishing the requirements, constraints, deliverables, out of scope and milestones. The budget allocation and resources available for a particular project is also effective set based set on the stakeholder criteria. The information of the different phases assists in changing requirement if required and solve the issue faced during the project (Barrett, Oborn and Orlikowski 2016).  The two images show the role of stakeholders in developing the project scope, allocating resources and offering best solutions to the company. This is through implementing the processes based on the agreed design and analysing the final product. This shows that stakeholders are the key element of the project and the project has to be developed and executed as per their requirements in order to make them satisfied.  The most important aspect of the project is to identify the key stakeholders and the information that needs to be conveyed. The type of information conveyed is also an important aspect as it is essential to understand the relevancy of information to the stakeholders.

The potential engagement activities in a project consists of developing a communication plan where the all the stakeholders will be provided information regarding depending upon their needs and their importance in the project (Aragonés-Beltrán,García-Melón and Montesinos-Valera2017). The activities of engagement will depend upon the approach taken in order to address stakeholders based on their influence and interest. The partnership approach has to be taken with the project board, project manager and governing body. These stakeholders are engaged in regular meetings as they discuss the challenges and progress of the project. This enables them to be remaining up to date about the project. The stakeholders having high influence and low influence participation approach has to be considered (Concannonet al.2014.). The engineers will fall in this category and meetings will be conducted after key milestones as they will provide inputs about the project to the other key stakeholders. The stakeholders having low influence and high interest will be engaged using the consultation approach where their feedback will be taken at intervals through meetings and they will also be provided with updates so that their valuable feedback is considered (Aragonés-Beltrán,García-Melón and Montesinos-Valera2017). Push and pull communication is used for the stakeholders having low interest and influence on the project. The stakeholder engagement will consist of developing an effective communication plan where different forms of communication medium are used to make the stakeholders aware of the progress of the project.

Identification and analysis of stakeholders

The engineering designer’s labor and employee cost is anticipated to be $27,000. This attains runway construction engineers an overall yearly expense of $97,200 (Cuppen et al. 2016). The employee cost per production hour to the organization is observed $ 59.49 for each production/ hour ($ 97200/ 1634) or $ 0.99 for each minute. In order to compute the engineering labor burden rate (5) for per work hour, subtracted from engineering designer’s labor burden rate (%) per production (work) hour, deduct the engineer’s hourly rate from, the individual’s fully burden cost ($59.49 - $28 = $31.49). This indicates that the additional cost to have the electrical engineer on the job, when computed as a percentage, add 113% ($31.49/$28 * 100) to the electrical engineer’s base hourly rate (Connelly et al. 2016).

The internal activities cost that is anticipated to be experienced in the airport project runway project is indicated below:

The external costs experienced in developing the airport runway are explained below:

The expert costs include the expenses offered to the personnel offering expert services in completion of the project (Kivits and Charles 2015). This includes design, consultation and development costs related with the airport runway project in Sydney.

Conclusion

The report has provided a descriptive analysis of all the key stakeholders engaged in the development of the parallel runway at Sydney Airport.  The key stakeholders have been identified in accordance to the modern-day requirements and overall engagement plan has been developed based on the stakeholder mapping and analysis. The report shows that legislative frameworks have also been followed as per the modern-day requirements. It was gathered from the report that the policy direction is better achieved using engagement plan and news methods of initiating a plan. Stakeholder engagement plan is one of the ways of maintaining transparency and take inputs from the stakeholders to get better results. The diverse range of issues can be identified using the engagement strategies and will provide the stakeholders the idea about the issues that will have to overcome and managed.

References

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Avery, J. and Balakrishnan, H., 2015. Predicting airport runway configuration: A discrete-choice modeling approach.

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