Stakeholders Management for Effective Software Engineering Projects in Nigeria

Software engineering projects (SEP) nowadays acknowledge the importance of incorporating many people, groups, and organizations with interest or requirements during project development phases for the realization of successful project. These groups who are collectively referred to as stakeholders are not limited to those who use it, rather those who build, test, operate, maintain, evaluate, and pay for it. One of the major concerns in SEP is the recognition and management of project stakeholders since the stakeholders are a major source of uncertainty in project. Stakeholders‘ management has long been recognized as increasing the propensity for successful delivery of projects, but the complete benefits of stakeholder management have yet to be exploited. Earlier research efforts indicated lack of comprehensive stakeholder management process because the existing frameworks in SEP either focused on a particular stage or failed to incorporate vital factors such as active listening, networking, stakeholder communication and feedback, social and professional relationship among stakeholders, rapport tradeoffs and conflict resolution. This research identified stakeholder management strategies and the criteria for judging effective SEP and determined how these contribute to the effectiveness of SEP. The research used survey method during data collection and analyzed the data using regression analysis to describe the linear relationship between each of stakeholder management strategies and effective SEP and multiple regression to predict the joint effects of stakeholder management strategies on effective SEP. The two main project constraints (time and cost) are considered to determine the project overall performance using discriminant analysis. It was possible to discriminate the 40 variables based on the given characteristics of project measured as failure, challenged, and success and to ascertain the predefined group a project belongs. The result showed that a project might be tagged successful while there are functionalities yet to be implemented. Also each of the identified strategies contributes significantly to effective SEP. This implies that the respondents strongly advocate the use of stakeholder management strategies in conjunction with project success measures to achieve project success. It was recommended that using the identified stakeholder management strategies and the criteria for measuring effectiveness, SEP will produce effective software product in the future.