EDUCATION PROJECT: THE SILESIAN UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY AS A CENTER OF MODERN EDUCATION - PERSPECTIVE OF STAKEHOLDERS MANAGEMENT

Increasing quality concerns in higher education are prompting universities to improve their educational programs, as well as concentrate more on the core competencies of their employees and students. Before universities take these actions, they must know what needs and expectations their key stakeholders have and work out a suitable strategy plan to properly address them. Stakeholder management should take place throughout the lifecycle of the project and is one of the key factors of project success. Managing stakeholder involvement within an education project is no easy task. How can success be achieved in this regard? In this article, this issue will be considered. Therefore, in this paper, we will focus on the framework for stakeholder management in an education project at the Silesian University of Technology. We describe which tools and techniques we use in that process, such as identification, classification and judgement of stakeholders in the entire project. Based on the results of this process, we develop an effective stakeholder management plan which presents how actions are directed towards key, active and potentially affective stakeholders, as well as informing them about progress, status and forecasts in projects. The main conclusion is that in this type of project, there are various types of stakeholders, whose requirements and objectives must be considered and managed. It means that effective stakeholder management in this case requires multilateral meetings with key stakeholders in order to organize a clear communication plan which is supported by appropriate IT tools, as well as building the matrix structure of the project team. The proposed method of stakeholder management in a wide-ranging education project can similarly be used in other projects.