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It is essential for projects to fulfil a wide spectrum of customer expectations including social, psychological, technological, and physical ones. The purpose of this paper is to identify roles within project networks that act as transmitters and linkers of this important knowledge, thereby resulting in appropriate and timely on-ground decision-making.

Qualitative case analysis coupled with social network analysis (SNA) is used to map project actors and identify key knowledge brokers within a complex co-location project. The project network comprised 91 actors from a range of project partners from public and private sectors.

The research identifies key knowledge brokers where selection appears to reflect their “heavyweight” stature, high social capital, technical expertise, and personality. The research recommends early identification of brokers from within and outside the parent organization/s.

The research covers a single, inductive, and interpretive study of a co-location project involving mature project organizations. Wider generalizability of findings to less mature organizations or those operating in vastly different sectors may be limited.

This study contributes to the existing body of literature on knowledge brokerage in projects and assists project managers in identifying and developing relevant brokers.

The study provides further evidence behind the argument that customer needs are translated into appropriate project decisions through key knowledge brokers.

This study aims to investigate projects as social exchange networks, focussing on identifying knowledge brokers within the project network where they are key holders and disseminators of end-user needs. The purpose is to augment current theory through a practice lens so that building end-user requirements can be better incorporated in evolving project ecosystems.

An interpretive, an inductive case study is used to map knowledge brokers during a complex construction and co-location project. During the wider study, a variety of methods including archival data, interviews and questionnaires along with social network analysis (SNA) were used. The mixed methodology used has been pivotal in the triangulation of data from various sources. However, the output of SNA presented in this paper relies mostly on interviews and questionnaires administered to the project’s core network. Network relationships were mapped with knowledge of user requirements, being the key determinant of the binary relationships between actors.

The research found certain roles to be central knowledge brokers of knowledge related to end-user processes, including real estate and strategic planning, building operations and management, human and environmental factors, planning and project management and facility and service delivery. The knowledge of the above roles, albeit in a contextually situated case study, augments current understanding of which roles to tap on during project execution for better representation of end-user needs.

The research site is representative of a complex network of construction project stakeholders, including several categories of end-users and their representatives. The study demonstrates the use of the project-as-practice approach, whereby project theory is seen to emerge directly from practice. This has impact on practice as emergent theory about knowledge transfer and knowledge brokerage is essentially practice-led and hence more useful and relate-able to practitioners.

Research presented here is novel in terms of its approach towards understanding end-user needs such as need for privacy, control, attachment and interaction during construction projects. This is done through the identification of relevant knowledge brokers. The study uses SNA as an analytical tool to map knowledge transfers through the project’s network. End-user requirements are usually captured in the front-end of projects as specifications and deliverables, as new challenges emerge during execution, changes are required to the project’s direction and outcomes. It is therefore imperative that end-user needs are re-identified through knowledge brokers holding key knowledge. This allows project managers to prepare appropriate responses to changing project ecosystems.