Discussion
This is the report that is entirely based on the stakeholder engagement plan at the Sydney Airport. The Sydney Airport is a big international located at the south of city centre of Sydney in Australia. This prestigious and heritage based airport is located at the heart of Australia and one of the big assets of the country. This airport is one of the busiest locations for the back and forth services and serves as the flight station for the Qantas airways. The Sydney Airport is the prime location for availing the flight services according to one’s relevance. The Sydney Airport is planning for the engagement of the stakeholders in for developing the airport services and enhancing the business activities. As it is one of the longest commercial airports in Australia several stakeholders needs to be engaged for the leveraging maximum benefits out of the airport services (Castro and Lohmann 2014). This busiest airport aims at providing the best of services to its passengers for maintaining the reputation of the airport authority. The stakeholder engagement procedure will help the authority to get a fair idea of the present conditions of the services and will also help them to make a fair judgement based on the results (Stubbs and Warnaby 2015). The stakeholders collectively may either support or disagree to the decisions taken by the airport authority as the stakeholders are the assets of any organisation and they play a huge part in influencing the welfare of the authority.
This section deals with several articles regarding the literature review of the stakeholder engagement plan at the Sydney airport. The stakeholder engagement planning has been done based on the present day conditions. The list of several proposal plans have been stated for a getting an overview of how the stakeholders will be affected by the decisions that were undertaken by the airport authority or will be undertaken in the upcoming stages of the development procedure of the airport authority (Klettner, Clarke and Boersma 2014). Reviewing the literary articles will help in having a fair idea of how the situations will be after several stakeholders are engaged in the development process of the authority.
As stated in the above parts of the discussion section, it is clear that the entire Sydney Airport is one of the busiest airports of Australia that is has been and currently involved in several large infrastructure projects. The projects that were undertaken and are being undertaken in the present day conditions requires a lot of purposeful involvement of the stakeholders and the several community members (Lohmann and Vianna 2016). It is because, the involvement of the stakeholders are beneficial for the authority and play a major role in influencing the issues and interests of the projects undertaken under the airport authority. The Sydney Airport authority believes that an effective participation of the stakeholders in the planning and delivering the infrastructure can help in bringing out the social, environmental and economic outcomes (Stewart 2013). The airport authority is dedicated in the engagement of the stakeholders and the community partners in an open, elaborative, achievable and timely manageable structure in the entire process of planning and production of the projects undertaken under the Sydney airport authority.
Engagement of stakeholders and community partners
The authority expects that the stakeholders and the community partners will be effective in delivering the needs for the betterment of the airport authority. It also expects that every situation will be dealt with proper commitment in the production procedure of delivering the needs for the authority under their respective domains. Other involved parties and the several contractors may be required for the effective communication and engagement of the stakeholders and the community members of the organisation (Kivits 2013). The communication procedure and the engagement of the stakeholders must be proactive and subtly incorporated for the planning and delivery of the projects under the name of the Sydney Airport authority. It is very much required that the distinctly identified issues and the effects on the community members and the stakeholders are predetermined, well versed and apprehended. It is because all these activities play a very large role regarding the engagement and communication activities.
As the Sydney Airport authority is a major airport that governs a section of the Australian economy, it needs to operate on a wide range of areas comprising of several other organisations and business structures. The motive of the airport authority is to provide the passengers with maximum benefits along with satisfying the stakeholders and other community members who has a major role to play in the betterment of the airport authority in delivering the company needs (Ferreira, Marques and Pedro 2016). The transition phase from a government oriented entity primarily focussing on the control and operations for appeasing the passengers to a private service centric entity compels substantial alterations in the emphasis and tactics of many organisations involved in the operation of the airport services (Bowyer and Chapman 2014). If the primarily directed function of an airport transits from passenger appeasement to maximum stakeholder returns, development of the commercial services, growing the number of passengers, the business models of the several organisations involved is bound to change in an exponential trend. An emphasis on the simultaneous development strategies involving the self supplied organisations and a clear approach to the inputs from several other organisations for an improvement and innovation is very vital (Price et. al. 2013). Simply put, it can be concluded that the airport authority must shift to a more open and innovative business model. In addition to the above sayings, a shift to a simultaneous involvement of the innovated business models is required, rather than just paying attention to the client concerns or a provider subjected improvisational discovery.
Organisation and the business models
The assets owned by a state are usually transported to private legalisation for the following set of reasons that are to lessen the involvement of government in the industrial purposes, to develop competence from the commercially oriented management authority, to lessen the economical load on the government and ultimately to allow an access to the investments of the private entities (Dhakal et. al. 2015). Along with this, the reasons are simultaneously vital for the privatisation of the country’s significant and crucial assets such as the airports that are located in various regions of the country. Along with this, more than a count of eighty countries have presented with some of the structures of commercialisation and privatisation of the airports since the decade of 1980.
During the time period before the 1980, the national government provided the airport operations with enough revenue across the international market. Accordingly, the management authority of the airport was controlled and was responsible to the state authorities which is one of the major stakeholders. The operations and the management team of the airport were wholly dependent on the total revenue from private sectors for the enhancement of the authority (Stanley 2017). But in the later stages of the funding process, funds supplied from the public sector of the operations became inadequate for the overall growth of the airport operations. It was due to the fact that the governments emphasising on the politically involved targets as that of education and health expenses. Due to the globalisation and the evolution process in the transportation of the industries, the air services demanded high modifications in the sector of aviation technologies (Amadi, Carrillo and Tuuli 2014). The high rate of requirement for the aviation services resulted in the need of an improvised infrastructure and the need for accepting a more business oriented approach of aviation services, making airports an effective and profitable opportunity of investment. In accordance with that, it is therefore concluded that privatisation is not to be granted as a form of rescue but as a process of transformation of the public attitudes to a responsibility of the economic structures, customer services and as well as single accountability of the system as a whole.
The national and state government of Australia arranged several agendas and decided that all the 22 airports of Federal and State Corporation is privatised when it came under the notion that the country is running through an economic development and is soon to become one of the top tourist attractions of the world. Several airports like the Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth were privatised with approachable privatisation plan and the Sydney Airport was privatised later based on the same idea (Jayasuriya, Zhang and Yang 2016). There was a huge argument regarding the revenue acquired. The argument was that the total investment required for the assets of these public ownerships to attain the international standards for maintaining importance of several competitions, levied economical obstructions for the national government to run an effective run of the aviation services. The government run airport authorities have been subjected to a trade sale for 50 years with an addition of more 29 years. Foreign ownership was ostracised to 49% as aviation services are the strategic assets and the airport ownership was reduced to 5% to keep the independence of the sectors intact.
Privatisation of Australian airport services
Several sources from the industry declared that the privatisation of the airport has incurred to an increasing innovation of the management skill sets, increasing the involvement of the stakeholders and allowance of the private sources of revenue to provide enough economical resources for the infrastructure and the overall commercial development (Sifolo, Rugimbana and Hoque 2017). Up to now the operators of the airline services has claimed that the international operations of the airport was supported by the Australian privatisation of the airline facilities. The operations team earn a huge profit from the commercial economic flows and the travellers of the airport procure an excellent state of service. Along with this there has been an emergence of the new individuals who have developed a grasp in the commercial markets.
In respect to the above sections, the opposition of the new era capitalism have protested for the reservations about the innovative role of the airports in the society. The prime concerns for the airline facilities were the accountability and the welfare of the public. In the initial stages during the development process, the privatisation of the Sydney Airport was vehemently criticised for being an airport that was governed by the environmental issues, ethical dilemmas and political outbreaks (Robertson and Newling 2015). In addition to that, there were several questions regarding the corporal strategies that was being carried forward by the system driven architecture and the inadequate article revenue for the private zones to make long term expenditure procedures. According to several journals, the main motive of the private company is profitability and not the service to the communities, which leads forward to the viewpoint that privatisation of the airline services negatively impacts the public welfare in an urge to see a growth in profitability. According to a study, there were many scandals and failures regarding the privatisation issue. Allegations have been drawn saying that often the users of the public services experience the negative impacts of privatisation, as they are not informed about the promised services.
Recently, at Sydney Airport the implementation activities after the privatisation claims of extreme charges of the airport in the non airline services have been made by the providers of the airline services. There have been allegations as well that the Sydney airline services charge the highest charges of the services they offer to the common public. There were allegations as well that the airport authority charges high prices for the car parking lot as well (Freestone and Wiesel 2015). Over the last decade there were acclamations as well that the airport authority did not show a prime concern for the passengers who were the main stakeholders of the authority. In the process of evaluating unrealistically the airport authority had to suffer a loss of the assets in the way of stakeholders that had an overall negative impact on the development process of the airport authority (Hooper et. al. 2016).
Although, there were several positive and negative claims regarding the privatisation process of the entire airport authority, this section evaluates the different issues in the innovation of the business model’s point of view with the Sydney Airport’s engagement plan for the stakeholders (Castro and Lohmann 2014). The privatisation of the airline services somehow posed a mixture of both the good and bad effect.
The national government of Australia in the year 2002 sold the airport authority to the Southern Cross Airports Corporation Holdings Limited (SCACH). The majority ownership of the SCACH was held by the Macquarie Bank infrastructure investment funds. Both the government and the airlines pointed out that while the aeronautical infrastructure was in an intact state without any manipulations at the time of privatisation, the terminals were not in a good shape at that time simultaneously for which it became a serious problem regarding the welfare of the national asset of the airport authority. In the year of 2009, the airport authority of the Sydney airport helped in the employment of the entire Sydney workforce. The airport contributes to most of the economy of Australia and the economy of the partner organisations. This was the main reason the privatisation technique was implemented on the projects that were undertaken by the Sydney Airport authority (Bezerra and Gomes 2016). The project team made in the entire stakeholder management plan is comprised of those people meant fully for the project or that is borrowed for an interim period. The project manager of any organisation needs to provide leadership in engaging the number of stakeholders to the government (Nartey, Dorobantu, and Henisz 2016). Often there are plural number of stakeholders in the project that is the projects undertaken by the Sydney Airport authority. The number of stakeholders in the project must kept to a level from where it will be possible for the organisation to keep them happy for the sake of the business. Sydney Airport authority failed to do so for which it was sold in the year 2002 after privatisation.
Conclusion
From the above reviews and declarations stated in this report of Stakeholder management plan of Sydney Airport, it can be concluded that both the internal and external stakeholders play an important role in the well being of a particular project that is concerned with the betterment of the company. Several literature reviews regarding the course of the topic has been discussed and analysed while structuring this report. While structuring the report the highlights of the organisation and business models, privatisation procedure of the Sydney Airport along with a case study regarding the same from 2002 to 2011 has been stated and discussed. Critical acclamations regarding the stakeholder management plan has been covered in this report. From the above sections, it can be concluded that a project is successful if and only if the objectives and the achievements exceeds beyond the expectations of the stakeholders. Stakeholders are really very important for the fostering of the completion of the concerned project because they are the ones or a set individuals who have a great influence in the welfare of the company in the future. If one of the stakeholder or the stakeholder group as whole is upset then it will surely hamper the overall performance of the company because they are the ones who set a high benchmark for the organisational reputation in the global market. Thus it is very much important to look after the welfare of the stakeholders and the community members and satisfy their needs according to the necessities.
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