A Fuzzy Linguistic Approach for Stakeholder Prioritization

Abstract

A factor considered relevant to achieve a successful project is stakeholder management. The stakeholder prioritization process is usually carried out by the project manager manually using techniques such as interviewing, brainstorming and checklists. These techniques do not take into account the uncertainty introduced by the evaluations of multiple experts in the stakeholder classification process. The objective of this research is to propose a fuzzy linguistic approach for stakeholder prioritization. To do this, a study is made about the stakeholders prioritizing process, as well as the techniques to manage information with uncertainty of the information. The steps of the proposed approach for stakeholder prioritization based on the linguistic 2-tuple model are described. An illustrative example is shown where the stakeholder prioritization is applied to a project to determine who the stakeholder is more important than another. The proposal is based on the computing with words paradigm that you can obtain more interpretable results firstly unifying the assessments of multiple experts into linguistic 2-tuple values and applying an accurate aggregation process. The correct classification of stakeholders allows prioritizing and attending to those that are most important for the project, allowing actions to be taken to avoid the negative impact and improve the positive impact.