ABSTRACT
Stakeholders are all the parties involved in the initiated project who have an interest directly or indirectly either as users or nonusers and can decide the acceptance and success of the project. Coordination is required within an agency at various hierarchical levels for the purpose of horizontal integration. When different agencies are interacting, issues of territorialism, institutional friction, the informal structure of the agencies, aligning agency goals, vested interests, and power distribution among stakeholders are a few of the issues to be dealt with. When the transportation legislation mandated the use of performance-based management by the local agency to be eligible for federal funding, it required collaboration at every level of state transportation. A prominent problem facing transportation agencies is the development of their staffs to keep abreast with the demand that technological advancements impose in terms of skill base and current required technical knowledge to provide the necessary support for optimal system performance.
