Review of Effective Practices for Managing Utility Coordination Stakeholders in Highway Projects

The increased proliferation of utility infrastructure within the public right-of-way has become a growing challenge. Today’s highway projects typically require interaction with many utility owners because of the increasingly complex utility infrastructure. Researchers have investigated different practices for effective utility coordination, including better communication and timely involvement of all stakeholders. Unfortunately, insufficient communication and coordination between utility stakeholders remain highly cited problems. Practitioners strongly believe that applying basic project management to utility issues can help alleviate those problems. Under the project management heading, stakeholder management is considered one of the most important tools and issues to project success. This fact, coupled with the persisting inefficiencies regarding communication and coordination among utility stakeholders, has created the need for a comprehensive review of stakeholder management literature in the utility coordination domain. This study aims to address this gap by analyzing the study interest of scholars in this field. Researchers conducted a systematic literature review that gathered relevant information from journal and conference papers and research reports. This information was categorized into the three well-known stakeholder theory approaches—descriptive, instrumental, and normative. The results revealed directions for future research regarding stakeholder management in utility coordination on highway projects.