Chapter 13

Introducing Project Stakeholder Management

CERTIFICATION OBJECTIVES

13.01   Identifying the Project Stakeholders

13.02   Planning for Stakeholder Management

13.03   Managing Stakeholder Engagement

13.04   Monitoring Stakeholder Engagement

  Two-Minute Drill

Q&A     Self Test

Some project managers believe that if it weren’t for the project stakeholders, their projects would go smoothly. But that’s like saying swimming would be easy if it weren’t for all the water. Project management—your job—wouldn’t exist if there were no stakeholders. And although stakeholder management can be a challenge, which is a nice way of saying a pain in the neck, the truth is that you need stakeholders in order to have a project. Stakeholders include anyone, including you, who has a vested interest in the project’s outcome.

Stakeholders are usually the key individuals on the project: the project customer, the project manager, the program manager, the project team, vendors, and decision-makers for the project. These key stakeholders can influence the project and shift the project in a certain direction, and they have political power to help overcome obstacles that may otherwise stall the project’s advancement. Stakeholders can also object to project decisions, challenge other key stakeholders, argue about the project work, and stall the project’s advancement.

Other stakeholders you’ll also have to manage don’t usually have as much power to exert over the project as the key stakeholders do. These are people and groups that include end users, the media, customers, and your target audience for the project deliverables. Sure, sometimes these groups and people can really dislike your project and cause havoc, but most of the time, these stakeholders are more passive and simply accept the existence of your project. You’ll have positive stakeholders, negative stakeholders, and neutral stakeholders in most of your projects.

Positive stakeholders, as you might guess, are the cheerleaders. Negative stakeholders are opposed to your project. Neutral stakeholders don’t care if your project succeeds or not, but they’re still involved with the project work. A neutral stakeholder could be an employee in your company’s procurement department who is involved with your project, but who doesn’t really care about your project’s success or failure.

Building a Strong Stakeholder Management Foundation

Stakeholder management is a project management knowledge area that focuses on four activities: identifying the project stakeholders, planning for stakeholder engagement, managing the stakeholder engagement, and monitoring the stakeholder engagement. Stakeholder management is an important, ongoing activity in any project. For your PMP examination, you’ll need to answer questions on how you’ll complete the four stakeholder management processes. The ultimate goal of stakeholder management is to keep stakeholders involved, interested, and supportive of the agreed-upon project scope.

The success of the project begins by identifying what constitutes project success. Much of what constitutes success will be easy to see: requirements, cost, quality, and schedule. But also included will be the stakeholder satisfaction—and that’s often a perception of how the project manager communicates, manages the project, and makes the stakeholders feel valued and welcome in the project. Stakeholder engagement is about meeting needs and expectations, so it’s no surprise that an important part of stakeholder management is understanding the stakeholders’ needs and expectations of the project manager. If you know what someone wants, it’s easier to satisfy that need in the project.

Leading Stakeholder Management

Leading stakeholder management begins by identifying the project stakeholders—all of the stakeholders, not just the people closely connected to the project. This broader set of stakeholders can include inspectors, regulatory bodies, lobby groups, environmentalists, your community, and even the media. Identification of stakeholders is the first step—and one of the most important steps—to leading stakeholders. If you overlook people who should be involved in your project, you’re likely going to have some people who aren’t very happy with you, and that’s a tough situation to overcome.

Stakeholder management is more than just identifying the stakeholders; it’s also about engaging people and keeping people engaged throughout the project. Stakeholder management includes the following:

   Keeping the project team involved with stakeholder engagement

   Periodically reviewing stakeholders to ensure that new stakeholders have come into the project

   Meeting with stakeholders to discuss how the project may affect them, which includes the concept of co-creation—meaning stakeholders become partners in the project, rather than just recipients of the project

Consider the positive and negative values of stakeholder engagement. Positive value describes the pros of keeping stakeholders engaged, while negative value describes the cons of not keeping stakeholders engaged. The negatives can include more than just financial consequences, and can also impact political capital, reputation, and customers satisfaction.

Agile projects promote the team, project manager, and stakeholder interactions. Often the developers and the stakeholder can communicate directly about the requirements, issues within the project, and goals of the current iteration. Transparency is important in agile, and that requires open communication among all the stakeholders. Change is expected, so access to the project team isn’t as guarded as you might find a predictive life cycle project. Stakeholders can attend project meetings, review project artifacts, and participate in reviews in agile projects.

Tailoring the Stakeholder Management Processes

I’ll bet you know this concept by now: You can tailor the stakeholder management processes for your organization. Every organization, every project, and every stakeholder is different, so you can certainly tailor the project to meet the concerns and expectations of project stakeholders. When you go about tailoring stakeholder management processes, there are three primary considerations:

   Diversity of the stakeholders The number of stakeholders, the organization culture, and even the social consideration of the organization and the project can influence how the processes are tailored.

   Complexity of stakeholder relationships The larger the project, the more complex the parts of the project will be. When stakeholders are considered parts of many different groups, miscommunications can happen, conflicts can erupt among the groups, and poor information can trickle out to the different types or categories of stakeholders.

   Communication technology Stakeholder engagement aligns with the project’s communications management plan. The communication technology needs to be considered because it can affect how you’ll communicate and who can receive communications based on the technical modalities you’ve selected for the project.

CERTIFICATION OBJECTIVE 13.01

Identifying the Project Stakeholders

All the project’s stakeholders should be identified before the project planning gets too far underway. One of the first project management processes a project manager should do, stakeholder identification ensures that all the stakeholders are identified and represented, and their needs, expectations, and concerns are addressed. Stakeholder identification helps the project manager communicate with the appropriate people throughout the project.

Before the project manager can begin project management communications, she needs someone to communicate with. This is where project stakeholders come into play. Stakeholders, as you know, are the people and organizations that are affected by the project. It’s essential for planning and for communications to identify the project stakeholders as early as possible in the project. Things can get ugly quickly when the project manager realizes that she may have overlooked any stakeholders who need to contribute to the project.

Stakeholder identification helps the project manager and the project team plan for the project’s activities, resources, and deliverables. The project manager and the project team may lead the stakeholder identification process, or a business analyst may help identify the stakeholders. In either case, it’s ideal to group stakeholders by their overall influence over project decisions, their involvement in the project work, and their interest in the project outcome. This categorization can help streamline communication.

Contracts are the most formal of all communications, because they are legally binding agreements between two or more parties. If the project is a result of a contract, everyone mentioned in the contract is considered a key stakeholder in the project. The organization’s procurement management processes, part of enterprise environmental factors, may affect how stakeholder identification and management happen when contracts are involved.

Preparing for Stakeholder Identification

Imagine that you’ve just landed a new project for a client you’ve never worked with. You’d be challenged to identify all the stakeholders in the project—after all, you might have a general idea of who should be involved in the project, but you don’t know who’s who at this new client. You’ll need some documents and some help to prepare stakeholder identification. This is the approach you should take in all your projects: always be thorough and pretend you don’t know who should be involved in the project. You don’t want an assumption to cause an oversight in stakeholder identification.

To prepare for the stakeholder identification process, you’ll need seven inputs:

   Project charter The charter identifies the people and groups that the project is for. It’s a great place to start collecting names and requirements of people the project affects.

   Business documents The business case will provide an initial list of the project stakeholders. The benefits management plan may also provide stakeholders who will benefit from the project.

   Project management plan You’ll specifically reference the communication managements plan and the stakeholder engagement plan.

   Project documents The change log is an input to this process, as changes to the project may introduce new stakeholders. The issue log can also identify stakeholders based on the issues. Requirements documentation can also help identify stakeholders.

   Agreements If you’re completing the project for another entity, the project’s contracts will help you identify some of the stakeholders you’ll need to manage. If your project procures goods and services, the vendors you’ll buy from are also stakeholders you’ll need to manage.

   Enterprise environmental factors The culture of an organization, regulations that affect the project, global stakeholder considerations, the physical location of the work and resources, and organizational trends and practices are all enterprise environmental factors that can affect stakeholder identification.

   Organizational process assets If you’re completing a current project that’s similar to a past project, you can use historical information to help you assess stakeholders, groups, and vendors. You can also use the stakeholder register from the past project as a template, and use lessons learned and plans from past projects to help identify the stakeholders in the current project.

Performing Stakeholder Identification

One of the best approaches to stakeholder identification is to meet with the project stakeholders you do know and ask who else should be involved in the project. These meetings, sometimes called profile analysis meetings, help the project manager learn about the project stakeholders and confirm that appropriate stakeholders are involved, are accounted for, and are contributing to the project’s success. A profile analysis meeting examines each of the roles in the project and documents each role’s interests, concerns, influence, knowledge about the project, and attitude toward the project.

Stakeholder identification tools and techniques includes data gathering through the traditional brainstorming approach. Another approach is called brain writing, in which participants review the questions or topics prior to the brainstorming session so they’re prepared to share their thoughts with the group.

Stakeholder analysis is a process that considers and ranks project stakeholders based on their influence, interests, and expectations of the project. This process uses a systematic approach to identify all the project stakeholders, ranking the stakeholders by varying factors, and then addressing stakeholders’ needs, requirements, and expectations. Stakeholder analysis follows three logical steps:

1.   Identify the project stakeholders and their interest, influence, project contributions, contact information, and expectations of the project. You can complete this through interviews to determine who are the project decision-makers and champions of the project’s objectives.

2.   Prioritize the identified stakeholders based on their power, influence, or impact on project decisions. Project managers can use a grid system to rank stakeholder attributes from low to high.

3.   Anticipate and plan how stakeholders will respond in different project scenarios. This anticipation helps the project manager influence the stakeholders and prepare them for project news, actions, and risk management.

Stakeholder analysis aims to identify stakeholders and what their stakes in the project may be. Stakes in the project are defined as follows:

   Interest The stakeholder is affected by the project.

   Rights (legal or moral rights) The stakeholder may have legal rights, such as physical safety, or moral rights, such as environmental concerns about where the project work is taking place.

   Ownership The stakeholder has ownership of an asset.

   Knowledge The stakeholder has knowledge that can help the project.

   Contribution The stakeholder is contributing to the project through funds, resources, or support of the project.

Visualizing Stakeholder Influence

Sometimes it’s best to visualize how the stakeholders can influence the project. You don’t want to spend hours and hours meeting with stakeholders who have little power over and little influence on your project. This doesn’t mean you ignore stakeholders with little power and little influence; you simply manage them differently than you would the CIO or the primary project customer. Classification models can help you rate the stakeholders who have the most power and influence over the project. One of the most common models, shown in Figure 13-1, is a power-interest grid. Instead of listing stakeholders’ names, you’d use letters or numbers to plot their power-interest on the grid.

FIGURE 13-1 A power-interest grid depicts the stakeholders’ power and interest over the project.

Each type of classification model demonstrates the amount of power, influence, interest, and impact a stakeholder can have on a project. Although all the models are similar, they each rate differing factors of the stakeholders:

   Power/interest grid This grid shows the relationship between the stakeholders’ power and interest over the project objectives.

   Power/influence grid This chart maps the amount of power and influence the stakeholders have over the project objectives.

   Influence/impact grid Similar to the other models, this chart plots out stakeholders’ influence in the project in relation to the impact of their power over the project decisions and objectives.

   Salience model This model typically uses three circles to show stakeholders’ power, urgency, and legitimacy over the project work, decisions, and influence on project objectives. Power, in this model, means the stakeholder’s level of authority and influence over decision-making. Urgency refers to the stakeholder’s need for attention regarding a project topic. Legitimacy means that the stakeholder should be involved in the project or decision. In some models, legitimacy can be substituted with proximity to rank stakeholder involvement with the project.

   Stakeholder cube This model is a three-dimensional cube that combines the power, influence, and impact grids.

   Direction of influence This illustrates a stakeholder’s influence on the project in one of five ways:

   Upward Senior management, customer, or steering committee

   Downward Project team, subject matter expert, or consultant

   Outward Suppliers, vendors, government agencies, customers, or the public

   Sideward Peers of the project manager or middle management who may need the same resources the project manager needs in the project

   Prioritization Priority levels of stakeholders in a large project; some stakeholders have greater priority than others

Reviewing the Results of Stakeholder Identification

The primary output of stakeholder identification is the stakeholder register. This document defines the stakeholders for the project and their contact information. The stakeholder register is a directory of all the stakeholders and should include the following:

   Stakeholder name and classification

   Geographic location

   Project role and contribution

   Project requirements and expectations

   Project influence

   Phase of the project the stakeholder is most concerned with

   Details on the stakeholder’s role—for example, internal or external, supporter of the project, negative stakeholder, or neutral

The stakeholder registry can help the project manager create a stakeholder management strategy. This strategy is an effort to manage stakeholder expectations and create synergy and buy-in. A stakeholder analysis matrix can help define the stakeholders’ interest, assessments of project impact, and any potential responses to the anticipated stakeholder results.

See the video “Stakeholders.”

This process also creates three additional outputs:

   Change requests Stakeholder identification could result in change requests to the requirements, project documents, or project management plan. Changes flow through the project’s integrated change control system.

   Project management plan updates The project management plan may need to be updated as a result of the stakeholder identification process. The requirements management plan, risk management plan, communications management plan, and stakeholder engagement plan can all be updated as a result of stakeholder identification.

   Project documents Project documents that may be updated as a result of the stakeholder identification process are the assumptions log, issue log, and risk register.

CERTIFICATION OBJECTIVE 13.02

Planning for Stakeholder Management

Stakeholder management planning is the process of creating a strategy to manage the stakeholders in the project. It’s the analysis of what the stakeholders want the project to do, how a stakeholder’s requirements align with those of other stakeholders, and how the stakeholders are prioritized within the project. In other words, it involves balancing the most important stakeholders in the project with the stakeholders who have less interest and influence over the project requirements.

That’s right—some stakeholders are more important than others. Some project managers bristle at the concept that not all stakeholders are considered equal. Sorry, but they aren’t equal. If you’re paying a company to build a house for you—a house that you’ve visualized and designed—do you really care that the landscaper in the project thinks your bedroom should go in the basement? No, you probably don’t; you’ve already created the house, you know where you want the rooms, and, besides, you’re paying for the new home, not the guy planting shrubs in the backyard. Now this doesn’t mean you tell the landscaper to buzz off; you should still manage the landscaper because he is a stakeholder in the project—he’s just not the most important stakeholder.

Stakeholder management is about managing how the project will affect all the stakeholders during the project execution and after the project is done. A software development project, for example, might include stakeholders’ input at the design stage, but you’ll also need to address the post-project support for the end users. The end users may fear what the project will create and how they’ll use the deliverables in their day-to-day lives. Stakeholder management is about communicating and addressing the needs, wants, threats, and even the perceived threats regarding the project, and this requires a plan.

Organizing the Planning

Because you’re creating a strategy for managing the project stakeholders, you’ll need to gather several documents and project components to craft your approach effectively. You’ll use these to help you understand the stakeholders—to see the project and deliverables from their perspectives—and to guide your strategy. The stakeholder management plan will go through versioning as the project progress. You may have to update the plan at the start of each phase or when changes occur within the organization. Less obvious times to update the plan include when people are no longer considered stakeholders because they leave the department, group, or project—and when new stakeholders come into the project. Changes within the project, such as risk or scope changes, can introduce or remove stakeholders, too.

You’ll need the following input to create the stakeholder management plan:

   Project charter The charter will have the base layer of stakeholder information and what’s important to these stakeholders.

   Project management plan The project management plan, as much as it may be created, will define the project’s life cycle and how the work is to be executed. The subsidiary plans you’ll review are the resource management plan, communications management plan, and the risk management plan.

   Project documents The assumption log, issue log risk register, and the change log will help you evaluate the stakeholders introduced to the project, and how the assumptions, issues, and risk management may affect them and your need to communicate and engage the stakeholders. You’ll also review the project schedule to communicate and engage stakeholders for upcoming work and the risk register for risks that may affect the stakeholders. The recently created stakeholder register will help you identify the stakeholders and formulize a strategy for stakeholder management.

   Agreements Contracts and internal agreements can help you plan for managing engagement with suppliers, sellers, and other entities within your organization.

   Enterprise environmental factors The culture of an organization, regulations that affect the project, and organizational policies will help with stakeholder management planning. You’ll also consider personnel administration policies, risk appetites, communication channels, global and regional trends and culture, and the physical location of project resources.

   Organizational process assets Lessons learned and historical information, especially from projects with the same or similar stakeholders, can provide insight on how best to manage the project stakeholders. Other organizational process assets can include corporate policies and procedures for social media, ethics, and security. You’ll also reference policies on risk, change, and data management and guidelines for the collection, storage, and retrieval of data. Your organization might also have software to help with stakeholder management.

Analyzing Stakeholder Engagement

At the launch of a project, it’s not unusual for the stakeholders to be excited about what you’re about to create. They’ll envision the better future state, the problem solved, the new opportunities seized. Stakeholders will want to come to your status meetings, they’ll gladly respond to project-related e-mails, and you can always get answers to your questions. But then the bloom begins to fade—especially on longer projects. Stakeholders get busy with other projects and other more pressing demands, and their interest in the project wanes.

Stakeholder engagement is the process of keeping stakeholders interested, involved, and supportive of the project. You need to help maintain the stakeholders’ energy for the project and keep them contributing and excited about what the project is creating. Stakeholder analysis is an approach that measures who’s interested in the project work and whose interest is fading. Stakeholder analysis helps you create a strategy to keep stakeholders engaged in the project.

Constraint and assumption analysis is needed to consider how the identified constraints and assumptions may affect your stakeholder engagement approach. You’ll use root cause analysis to determine why stakeholders may not be supportive of your project, and SWOT analysis to help you create a stakeholder strategy to improve upon current engagement of stakeholders.

You’ll perform stakeholder analysis not just at the beginning of a project, but throughout the project. Subject matter experts can help with this process, of course. You’ll monitor the status of the stakeholders and determine whether any attitudes toward the project success have changed; you’ll rank the current stakeholder engagement and set a goal for the desired level of stakeholder engagement. After analysis, you can categorize stakeholders into five groups in a stakeholder engagement matrix:

   Unaware The stakeholder doesn’t know about the project or the effect the project may have on him.

   Resistant The stakeholder is aware of your project but isn’t keen on the changes your project will create.

   Neutral The stakeholder is aware of your project and doesn’t care if the project succeeds or fails.

   Supportive The stakeholder is aware of your project, is happy about the project, and hopes your project is successful.

   Leading The stakeholder is aware of your project, wants the project to succeed, and is helping to lead the charge to make certain the project outcome is positive.

Your interactions and meetings with the stakeholders will help you determine who’s excited about the project, who’s unaware of the project changes, and who just doesn’t want your project to succeed. You can chart out the results of stakeholder analysis in a simple table, but keep this chart away from prying eyes. You don’t want a negative stakeholder to see the analysis and become more agitated and aggressive about the project. This analysis helps you and the project team create a plan for stakeholder engagement; it’s not a plan for political battles in the office.

Building the Stakeholder Management Plan

The stakeholder management plan helps the project manager and the project team define a strategy for managing the project stakeholders. It helps to establish stakeholder engagement at the launch of the project and throughout the project life cycle, and it shows how to improve upon the level of engagement identified. Stakeholder management doesn’t necessarily aim to win over all the stakeholders to the project’s vision, but it can help you manage the stakeholders’ attitudes toward the project. For example, the CEO of a company can say that the organization will be migrating to a new type of software. The end users may not be happy about the choice—in fact, they could be angry about the choice. The organizational power, the CEO, however, has defined the project and mandate so the project manager must complete the project accordingly.

Just because you have a negative stakeholder—or even many negative stakeholders—doesn’t mean that your project will fail. Negative stakeholders who are able to influence project decisions, or even hold up the project due to indecisions, must still be managed. The power influence of each stakeholder directly affects how the project manager manages the stakeholders in the project. These are the types of conditions that need to be documented and strategized in the stakeholder management plan. It’s an honest assessment of who the stakeholders are and how the stakeholders can help or hinder the project.

The stakeholder management plan defines the following:

   Current stakeholder engagement levels and goals for improvement

   How the project will affect the stakeholders

   Relationships among stakeholders

   Communication requirements for the project stakeholders

   Plan and schedule for updating the stakeholder management plan as needed based on conditions within the project

The stakeholder management plan can be adapted from organizational process assets—specifically, older and similar projects. The stakeholder management plan is tightly linked to the project’s communications management plan, especially regarding information distribution. Both plans define who needs what information, when the information is needed, and the expected modality of the information. The stakeholder management plan, however, predicts and documents how the stakeholders will react to the information that the project manager distributes. It shouldn’t take a mind-reader to know that bad news won’t be accepted gently from the stakeholders.

CERTIFICATION OBJECTIVE 13.03

Managing Stakeholder Engagement

Early in the project, it’s obvious that stakeholders need to be involved, but as the project moves forward, stakeholder engagement often tends to wane. Stakeholder engagement simply means that you’re keeping the stakeholders involved in the project, you’re communicating with the project stakeholders, and you’re addressing their needs, fears, and perceptions about the project work. In some instances, stakeholder engagement means that you’re working with negative stakeholders through negotiations to overcome their opposition to the project.

Stakeholder engagement is linked closely to project communications. Recall in Chapter 10 the purpose of the project communications management plan: to get the right message to the right audience at the right time. Stakeholder engagement relies heavily on the project communications management plan as part of its approach. The project communications must be accurate, timely, and precise, or the project manager could damage the relationship between the project and the stakeholders. You don’t want to create new problems for the project—and new stakeholder management challenges—by simply failing to communicate. Communication of good or bad news is something that the project manager should always do.

You’ll need four total inputs in the manage stakeholder engagement process:

   Project management plan Within the project management plan, you’ll need the communication management plan, the risk management plan, the stakeholder management plan, and the change management plan.

   Project documents Several project documents will help you manage stakeholder engagements: the change log, issue log, lessons learned register, and stakeholder register.

   Enterprise environmental factors Enterprise environmental factors to consider include the organizational culture, politics, governance, personnel administration, risk thresholds, communication channels, global and regional trends and practices, and geographical location of project resources.

   Organizational process assets Historical information, change control procedures, the approach for issue management, data management, and your organization’s communication methodology are all organizational process assets that are used as part of stakeholder engagement inputs.

Engaging Stakeholders

As soon as people and groups get involved in the project, you’re starting the process of stakeholder engagement. Ideally, you’ve had time to plan and ponder how to engage stakeholders, but often your interactions with stakeholders are early in the project. This is where your years of experience as a project manager and professionalism come into play: you instinctively know how to deal with people and how to respect people, and you understand their needs and wants for the project. These are the interpersonal skills that you develop and refine over time—the softer skills of project management that you’ll finesse with practice, through trial and error, and through maturity. You’ll need the following interpersonal skills to engage stakeholders:

   Conflict management

   Cultural awareness

   Negotiation

   Observation and conversation

   Political awareness

Your interpersonal skills must be balanced with your management skills. As likeable and charming as you may be, you must have some management skills to help move the project and stakeholders along. Management is about getting things done—organizing and directing people to work together, rather than independently, to get the project done. As a project manager, you need the organization, vision, and authority to guide and direct the project team, vendors, organizations, and other stakeholders to dig in and get the work done. You’ll need the following management skills to engage stakeholders:

   Ability to present project information

   Ability to negotiate with stakeholders

   Ability to write and communicate

   Ability to speak in public

Notice that these management skills are linked in some way to communication. Communication is the underlying principle to engaging stakeholders effectively. When you communicate with stakeholders, you’re interacting with them, you’re providing information, and you’re taking in information—that’s the engagement of stakeholders. Communication is so important for a project manager that if you fail to communicate well, your project is likely doomed.

Three types of communications are linked to effective stakeholder engagement:

   Interactive communications Information is flowing among stakeholders in a forum. Meetings, videoconferences, phone conferences, and even ad hoc conversations are all examples of interactive communications in which the participants are actively communicating with one another to ensure that all participants receive the correct messages and conclusions.

   Push communications In push communications, the sender pushes the same message to multiple people. Think of memos, faxes, press releases, broadcast e-mails: these are all pushed from one source to multiple recipients.

   Pull communications Often projects use web sites to present project information, reports, status updates, and documents for project stakeholders to peruse. Such a central repository of information enables stakeholders to pull the information from the central source when they want it. In pull communication, the stakeholders retrieve the information as they desire rather than the information being sent, or pushed, to them.

Examining Results of Stakeholder Engagement

Stakeholder engagement provides many benefits for the project manager, but chief among them is feedback from the project stakeholders. The whole point of stakeholder engagement is to keep stakeholders involved in the project, to foster communications, and to safeguard the project from delays, wasted time, and miscommunications. Although stakeholder involvement creates feedback for the project manager and the project team, you should be familiar with the following outputs of the process for your PMP exam:

   Change requests Ah, yes…. Change requests are a likely output of stakeholder engagement. Although changes can be the bane of a project manager’s job, they are expected and need to be managed. Remember, too, that just because someone asks for a change doesn’t necessarily mean the change is going to happen in the project.

   Updates to the project management plan The project management plan is a fluid document that will evolve throughout the project life cycle. Stakeholder engagement can cause the project management plan to be updated through change requests, risk identification, quality concerns, changes to communication needs, and more. As you engage stakeholders, they become more involved with the project, and their involvement should help you refine the project management plan.

   Updates to the project documents The issue log, change log, lessons learned register, and the stakeholder register can all be updated.

CERTIFICATION OBJECTIVE 13.04

Monitoring Stakeholder Engagement

Although it would be nice and dreamy for stakeholder engagement to run itself, it doesn’t work that way. You, the project manager, must be involved in the process, adjusting your actions, fostering relationships, and keeping an eye on stakeholders and their wants, needs, fears, and perceived threats. Projects will evolve, change, and fall prey to gossip, politics, and other nasty elements, but you’ll have to keep stakeholders involved to solve problems, be readily available to communicate, and take on challenges as they pop up. Projects are created by and for people, so it makes sense that you’ll have to control the depth of stakeholder engagement as the project moves toward its happy conclusion.

Monitoring stakeholder engagement isn’t a stand-alone process. Like all project management processes, it’s integrated with the other knowledge areas. Consider the decisions you’ll make in any area of the project and how those decisions will affect your stakeholders. Stakeholders usually put their trust and confidence in you to lead the project, but times will occur when a decision or action won’t keep all the stakeholders satisfied and content with the project. These are the moments you’ll need to act, to communicate with stakeholders and help them see why your actions, decisions, and good judgment are best for the overall project.

Taking Action for Stakeholder Engagement

Monitoring stakeholder engagement means that you, the project team, and the key stakeholders are communicating with one another on a consistent basis. If, for example, your project team is conveying information to stakeholders that differs from what you’re telling stakeholders, trouble will abound. When stakeholders hear conflicting information about the project, they’ll be confused and concerned, and often they may choose to listen to the message that suits them best. The foundation for stakeholder engagement, and monitoring stakeholder engagement, begins with a solid foundation of communications.

To monitor stakeholder engagement, you’ll need several components to help with the process:

   Project management plan The project management plan helps you monitor stakeholder engagement because it establishes the project governance and project framework. You’ll utilize the resource management plan, communications management plan, and the stakeholder engagement plan.

   Project documents Specifically, you’ll need the issue log, lessons learned register, project communications, risk register, and stakeholder register.

   Work performance data Key performance metrics are measured, analyzed, and reported. This includes such objectives as time, cost, percentage of work completed, quality control measurements, and any other factors that need to be measured in your project. These elements will help you communicate the project’s health and manage the stakeholder expectations of the project’s success. You’ll typically measure work performance at predesignated points in the project, such as at milestones or key project deliverables.

   Enterprise environmental factors The usual business in the enterprise environmental factors will help you monitor stakeholder engagement. This usual business includes the culture, politics, personnel administration, risk thresholds, communication channels, global aspects of the project, and the geographical location of resources.

   Organizational process assets Organizational process assets are also used to monitor stakeholder engagements. The policies and procedures for social media, ethics, security, and risk, change, and data management are included in organizational process assets. You might also reference guidelines on information management and historical information from past, similar projects.

When in doubt, communicate. The largest problem I’ve experienced as a project management consultant is that project managers don’t communicate with their stakeholders. Communication is the number one strategy for improving your project.

Completing Stakeholder Engagement Monitoring

The actual act of monitoring stakeholder engagement requires, of course, communication among the project manager, project team, and other key stakeholders, but some tools and techniques can also assist the process. One of the primary tools is simply to meet with stakeholders. That’s right: face-to-face meetings are one of the best communication methods, because you gain insight via nonverbal communications and you and the stakeholders can quickly hash out any differences, find resolutions, and then get back to the project.

You can also use a reporting system tool, which is usually a software program that can capture, store, and provide data analysis on the project. A good reporting tool enables the project manager to take project information, such as percentage of work complete, run the data through some earned value analyses, and then create reports to share with the stakeholders. This is also a good example of a tool that could be a push communicator—you’d push the reports out to the stakeholders—and a tool that would also serve as a pull communicator—stakeholders could retrieve the information as they see fit. In either case, the central repository of project data enables the project manager to create reports, make presentations, and perform data analysis.

Remember data representation in the stakeholder engagement matrix? That matrix can help you monitor the current stakeholder engagement levels and confirm that stakeholder statuses are moving toward or remaining engaged. Your interpersonal skills and team skills, along with communication skills, can be leveraged here as well. The goal is get and keep a satisfactory level of stakeholder engagement.

The final tool and technique you’ll use to monitor stakeholder engagement is to rely on expert judgment. Experts, such as senior management, organizational units, functional managers, other project managers, consultants, and key stakeholders, can help the project manager identify new stakeholders, resolve issues among stakeholders, and provide assessment of current stakeholders. This tool also provides an approach to remove management of stakeholders who may no longer be involved in the project.

Reviewing the Results of Monitoring Stakeholder Engagement

You’ll never really stop monitoring stakeholder engagement until your project moves into closure. Throughout the project, you’ll have different levels of stakeholder engagement, which in turn will require different levels of effort. As a rule, the larger the project, the more stakeholders will be involved, and this means you’ll have to provide more stakeholder engagement monitoring. Actively monitoring stakeholders helps you keep an eye on the project progress, keep stakeholders from losing interest and support in the project, and keep accountable to key stakeholders who are sponsoring and paying for the project.

There are four outputs of monitoring stakeholder engagement:

   Work performance information The data that has been collected throughout the project is assimilated and analyzed, and the resulting information is used by the project manager to make project decisions. Examples include the project schedule status, percentage of work completed, and forecasts for project schedule and costs.

   Change requests Work performance information, stakeholder communications, and the results of the project work can all lead to change requests in the project. Change requests also include recommended corrective and preventive actions.

   Project management plan updates Changes to the project management plan go through integrated change control. Three primary plans are likely to be updated by monitoring stakeholder engagement: resource management plan, communications management plan, and the stakeholder engagement plan.

   Project document updates Documents, the stakeholder register and the issue log, will likely be updated as a result of monitoring stakeholder engagement. These documents will become part of organizational process assets once the project is closed. The risk register and the lessons learned register may also be updated.

CERTIFICATION SUMMARY

Stakeholders are the people and groups involved in the project and the people who are affected by the project. If you, as the project manager, will be speaking with someone about the project, chances are that person is a stakeholder. Stakeholders can influence the success or failure of the project. Positive stakeholders are the people who are cheering your project onward and want your project to succeed. Negative stakeholders are the humbugs who don’t want your project to exist at all. Finally, neutral stakeholders, such as inspectors and procurement people, don’t care one way or the other about your project’s success.

Stakeholders need to be identified as early as possible in the project—and new stakeholders will be identified throughout the project life cycle. This process ensures that the appropriate stakeholders are involved in the project; if you overlook a stakeholder or a group of stakeholders in the project, this person or group won’t be keen on cheering your project forward. Meeting with existing stakeholders can help you identify other stakeholders. Consultants, management, and other project managers in the organization can also help you identify who should be involved in the project. A stakeholder register is a log of all the stakeholders you’ve identified along with their attitudes, interests, and concerns about the project.

A stakeholder management plan is a tool to help you create a strategy for managing stakeholder concerns, interests, and level of engagement in the project. The stakeholder management plan is tied to the project’s communications management plan, because so much of stakeholder management is about communicating with stakeholders. You need to know who needs what information, when the information is needed, and what the best approach is to deliver the project information. Stakeholders have expectations about project communication, and it’s up to the project manager to identify those expectations and meet them throughout the project.

Stakeholder engagement is a process of keeping stakeholders involved, interested, and contributing to the project. If the stakeholders lose interest in the project, especially stakeholders with lots of influence on the project decisions, the project can succumb to politics, negativity, and lack of organizational interest—not something any project manager wants to happen. Stakeholder engagement helps the project manager keep the stakeholders engaged and informed in the project through communications, interpersonal skills, and management skills. You must meet, talk with, and encourage stakeholders to contribute to the project to keep their interest and involvement.

Key Terms

To pass the PMP exam, you will need to memorize the following terms and their definitions. For maximum value, create flashcards based on these definitions and review them daily. The definitions can be found within this chapter and in the glossary.

interactive communications   A flow of information among stakeholders in which participants are actively communicating with one another to ensure that all participants receive the correct message and conclusions. Meetings, videoconferences, phone conferences, and even ad hoc conversations are examples of interactive communications.

leading stakeholders   Stakeholders who are aware of your project, want the project to succeed, and are leading the charge to make certain the project outcome is positive.

negative stakeholders   Stakeholders who are opposed to the project’s existence; they do not want the project to succeed, because they do not see or agree with the benefits the project may bring about for the organization.

neutral stakeholders   Stakeholders who are not concerned about the project’s success or failure, such as inspectors, procurement officers, and some end users.

positive stakeholders   Stakeholders who want the project to succeed; these are often the people who have the most to gain from the project’s success and/or the most to lose if the project fails.

pull communications   The central repository of information enables stakeholders to pull the information from the central source when they want it. In pull communications, the audience retrieves the information as they desire rather than the information being sent, or pushed, to them.

push communications   The sender pushes the same message to multiple people via memos, faxes, press releases, broadcast e-mails, and other forms of group communication.

reporting system   Often a software program that can capture, store, and provide data analysis regarding the project. A good reporting system tool enables the project manager to gather project information, such as percentage of work complete; run the data through some earned value analyses; and then create reports to share with stakeholders.

resistant stakeholders   Stakeholders who are aware of your project, but aren’t keen on the changes your project will create.

stakeholder analysis   A process that considers and ranks project stakeholders based on their influence, interests, and project expectations. This process uses a systematic approach to identify all of the project stakeholders, ranking the stakeholders by varying factors, and then addressing stakeholders’ needs, requirements, and expectations.

stakeholder classification models   Grids that rank stakeholders’ influence in relation to their interest in the project. Several types of these models are used as part of stakeholder analysis. The most common models are the power/interest grid, the power/influence grid, the influence/impact grid, and the salience model.

stakeholder cube   A three-dimensional cube model that combines the power, influence, and impact grids.

stakeholder engagement   The process of keeping stakeholders interested, involved, and supportive of the project. The project manager needs to maintain the energy of the stakeholders and keep them contributing to and excited about the project.

stakeholder identification   The process of ensuring that all the stakeholders have been identified as early as possible in the project: all the stakeholders are identified and represented, and their needs, expectations, and concerns are addressed.

stakeholder management   A project management knowledge area that focuses on four activities: identifying the project stakeholders, planning on how to manage the stakeholders, managing the stakeholders, and monitoring the stakeholders’ engagement.

stakeholder management plan   A plan that helps the project manager and the project team define a strategy for managing the project stakeholders. It helps to establish stakeholder engagement at the launch of the project and throughout the project life cycle, and it offers information about how to improve the level of engagement identified.

stakeholder management planning   The process of creating a strategy to manage the stakeholders in the project. It’s the analysis of what the stakeholders want the project to do, how a stakeholder’s expectations align with those of other stakeholders, and the prioritization of the stakeholders within the project.

stakeholder register   A register that documents all the stakeholders’ information, position, concerns, interests, and attitude toward the project. The stakeholder register should be updated as new stakeholders are identified or as stakeholders leave the project.

supportive stakeholders   Stakeholders who are aware of your project, are happy about the project, and hope your project is successful.

unaware stakeholders   Stakeholders who don’t know about the project and the effect the project may have on them.

TWO-MINUTE DRILL

Identifying the Project Stakeholders

   Stakeholders are all the people, groups, and organizations that can affect the project or that are affected by the project.

   Stakeholder identification should begin as early as possible in the project and should continue throughout the project.

   Stakeholder analysis helps the project manager rate the stakeholders’ influence, power, interest, and impact on the project. This analysis can be charted into a classification model.

   All identified stakeholders are documented in the stakeholder register. The stakeholder register includes the stakeholders’ identification, assessment of the project, and classification of stakeholder type.

   The stakeholder register should be updated as new stakeholders are identified in the project, when stakeholders leave the project, or when stakeholder information changes during the course of the project.

Planning for Stakeholder Management

   The stakeholder management plan helps the project manager determine the required level of engagement for the identified stakeholders throughout the project life cycle.

   Stakeholder engagement is needed to keep stakeholders interested, involved, and informed about the overall project status.

   Stakeholders are categorized based on their project engagement levels as unaware, resistant, neutral, supportive, and leading. These rankings can change over the project life cycle, and they help the project manager determine the level of needed engagement and communication with the stakeholders.

   Planning for stakeholder management is linked closely to the project’s communications management plan. Stakeholders require varying levels of communication based on their needs, wants, concerns, and fears about the project.

Managing Stakeholder Engagement

   The process of managing stakeholder engagement aims to meet stakeholders’ needs and expectations. Communicating with stakeholders and following the project’s stakeholder management plan and the project’s communications management plan accomplish much of this process.

   Stakeholder engagement aims to reinforce the concept that stakeholders share the ownership of the project.

   Communications with stakeholders are pushed to the stakeholder through a distribution system, pulled by the stakeholder from a central source, or are interactive among the stakeholders through multidirectional communications, such as meetings and conferences.

   Stakeholder engagement is also achieved through the project manager’s interpersonal skills, such as building trust, resolving conflicts among the stakeholders, and overcoming stakeholders’ resistance to the changes the project may bring about. Other management skills are also needed: presenting ideas and project status, facilitating negotiations, and communicating through writing and public speaking.

Monitoring Stakeholder Engagement

   Stakeholder engagement, like many project management processes, must be monitored throughout the project. There’s a balance between planning, executing, and monitoring this knowledge area.

   A reporting system can help the project manager collect and distribute project information through reports, analysis, push and pull communications.

   Stakeholder identification must also be monitored in the sense that new stakeholders must be identified as they become involved with the project. All stakeholders must be documented in the stakeholder register.

   Monitoring stakeholder engagement may result in change requests, including corrective and preventive actions. Stakeholder engagement is reliant on project communications, so it’s natural that stakeholders may readily communicate desired changes or flaws they’ve identified in the project.

   Organizational process assets are updated as part of monitoring the stakeholder engagement. This includes stakeholder notifications, reports, presentations, performance records, feedback, and lessons learned.

SELF TEST

1.   You are the project manager of the Server Update Project for your organization. This project has 543 stakeholders, many of which are end users. Some of the end users are critical of the server update because they’re concerned about where the data is stored, how they’ll access the data in the future, and their mapped drives. You’ve communicated with all the users that the server update will change how the users will access their files and home folders in the future. Now some of the end users have been complaining to their functional managers about the change. In this scenario, what type of stakeholders are the end users?

A.   Uninformed

B.   Negative

C.   Unresponsive

D.   Low influence/low interest

2.   Beth is the project manager of a new construction project for her organization’s client. This project will construct a new bridge in a major thoroughfare in her city. Beth is preparing for stakeholder identification because she wants to capture all the internal and external stakeholders who may influence and be influenced by this project. In her preparations, Beth will need all the following documents as inputs except for which one?

A.   Project charter

B.   Enterprise environmental factors

C.   Organizational process assets

D.   Risk management plan

3.   You are the project manager for a software development project for your company. This project will create a web-based application that will enable users to create maps for different hiking trails in North America. You’ll be working with developers who are employees of your company and developers who are contract-based. Your project will also include information from the National Parks Service, local communities, and hikers from around the United States. You and the project team will first complete stakeholder analysis to make certain that you’ve captured all the project stakeholders. What are the three logical steps to stakeholder analysis for this project?

A.   Identify the stakeholders, prioritize the stakeholders, anticipate stakeholder responses

B.   Identify the stakeholders, confirm the project scope, communicate the project plan

C.   Identify the stakeholders, anticipate stakeholder responses, create a response strategy

D.   Identify the stakeholders, meet with the stakeholders to address concerns, create a stakeholder response plan

4.   You have been working on a new project that will affect your entire organization of 1233 people. You and the project team know that you should create a stakeholder register for the stakeholders, but is it necessary to create 1233 entries in this register?

A.   Yes; all stakeholders should be identified.

B.   Yes, but it is appropriate to group the stakeholders for easier management.

C.   No; only the key stakeholders need to be identified in the stakeholder register.

D.   No; only negative stakeholders and key stakeholders must be documented in the stakeholder register.

5.   Mike is the project manager of a new software deployment project that will affect 3235 people in his organization. He’s communicated the deployment and explained the effect the software will have on the organization, and his plan includes training for the end users. Some of the stakeholders, especially the functional managers, are worried about the deployment and how it will affect the organization’s productivity. Anna, the project sponsor, asks Mike to create a visual diagram showing which stakeholders can affect the project the most based on their power in the organization. What chart should Mike create?

A.   Power/influence diagram

B.   Pareto diagram

C.   Tornado diagram

D.   Ishikawa diagram

6.   Harold is the project manager for a large construction project his company is completing for a client. This project has internal and external stakeholders, including members of the community who are opposed to the project, although it has been approved by the city. Harold is preparing to create a stakeholder management plan and he’s gathering several inputs for the plan’s creation. Which one of the following inputs will most help Harold create a strategy for stakeholder management and engagement?

A.   Project management plan

B.   Stakeholder register

C.   Enterprise environmental factors

D.   Communications management plan

7.   You are the project manager of a large software deployment project for your organization. This project will replace the operating systems on the computers of all employees. Many of the employees are in favor of this change in operating systems, while others are not. As part of your plan, you complete an analysis of the stakeholders. In this analysis, you and the project team have discovered that some of the project stakeholders didn’t know about the change in the company’s approved computer operating system. How would you classify these stakeholders?

A.   Unaware

B.   Uninformed

C.   Lacking

D.   Target for positive

8.   You are the project manager of a large software deployment project for your organization. This project will replace the operating systems on the computers of all employees. Many of the employees are in favor of this change in operating systems, while others are not. As part of your plan, you complete an analysis of the stakeholders. In this analysis, you and the project team have also learned that the functional managers are not in favor of the change of the operating system for their employees’ laptops. How would you classify these stakeholders?

A.   Neutral

B.   Resistant

C.   Leading

D.   Hesitant

9.   What is the purpose of the stakeholder management plan?

A.   To convert all stakeholders to positive, supportive stakeholders

B.   To identify the stakeholders who are opposed to the project

C.   To manage the stakeholders’ attitudes toward the project

D.   To communicate with the stakeholders about the project status

10.   Morgan is the project manager of a web site creation project for a client. Some employees at the client’s site are excited about the change and they are helpful with Morgan’s plan for the new web site design. In the stakeholder management plan, Morgan has identified the tactics for managing the stakeholders, and she has identified the positive stakeholders with which categorization?

A.   Happy

B.   Leading

C.   Supportive

D.   Informed

11.   You are a project manager for your company and you’ve just created the project’s stakeholder management plan. This plan is based on organizational process assets and enterprise environmental factors that you’re required to use in the project. The stakeholder management plan includes all the following components except for which one?

A.   The relationships among the stakeholders

B.   The relationships among the project team

C.   The schedule of stakeholder information distribution

D.   Communication requirements for stakeholders

12.   Sam is the project manager of the GHQ Project for his company, and he’s recently discovered a scheduling conflict with two of the vendors on the project. Sam knows that the conflict will likely cause a two-week delay in the completion of the project. What should Sam do?

A.   Report the problem to management.

B.   Report the problem to the stakeholders.

C.   Say nothing unless the delay becomes greater than two weeks.

D.   Propose a solution to management.

13.   You are the project manager of a large project in your company. Your project has been in motion for three months, and you’re about to move into the first phase of project execution. Your sponsor calls to report that you’ve apparently overlooked some stakeholders during the project’s planning phase. What should you do now?

A.   Immediately contact the stakeholders, apologize, and analyze the stakeholders.

B.   Begin the project execution but contact the stakeholders for a meeting.

C.   Determine whether the oversight has damaged the project’s objectives.

D.   Schedule a meeting with the stakeholders to catch them up on the project.

14.   Steve is the project manager of a new project that will affect 4534 people in his organization. Some of the stakeholders are not happy about the project, but they understand the need for the project work. How should Steve manage these unhappy but compliant stakeholders?

A.   Ignore their complaints.

B.   Explain the benefits of the project.

C.   Categorize them as resistant.

D.   Some stakeholders may just be unhappy.

15.   Marvin is the project manager of a new project for his company. He’s been working with the project team and the project sponsor to keep the stakeholders engaged. As part of this process, Marvin will need four inputs to stakeholder engagement. Which one of the following is not one of the inputs for stakeholder engagement?

A.   Change log

B.   Organizational process assets

C.   Communications management plan

D.   Quality management plan

16.   You are the project manager of a large project that will affect how your organization accepts and processes orders from customers. Many of the stakeholders have strong opinions about the project and how it should proceed. Thomas, the manufacturing manager, and Jane, the sales manager, have been in conflict with each other over some of the project’s requirements. You’ve met with these two stakeholders to identify their differences, negotiate a resolution, and come to an agreement about the requirements in the project. What stakeholder engagement tool and technique have you used effectively in this scenario? Choose the best answer.

A.   Active listening

B.   Stakeholder resolution

C.   Management skills

D.   Interpersonal skills

17.   One of the tools you’ll have to use as a project manager in the stakeholder management knowledge area is management skill. Management skills help you organize stakeholder concerns and keep the project moving forward. All the following are examples of management skills except for which one?

A.   Presenting project information

B.   Negotiating with stakeholders

C.   Public speaking

D.   Analyzing work performance information

18.   You are the project manager of the JNH Project for your company. This project is scheduled to last 18 months and will affect 435 stakeholders in your organization. The project has sensitive information that only certain stakeholders should have access to, so you’ve created a plan for communicating the information to the correct parties throughout the project through special e-mail bulletins. What type of communication is secured e-mail considered to be?

A.   Push

B.   Interactive

C.   Sensitive

D.   Passive

19.   You are the project manager for your organization, and you’ve contracted two organizations to complete parts of the project. The project requires that these two different companies work together on parts of the project. One of the vendors will need to install network cables throughout a building, while the other company is responsible for connecting the networking cables to a central patch panel and to the individual networking receptacles. The vendors disagree about how the work should take place. What’s the best approach to manage this scenario?

A.   The vendors are not stakeholders and must live up to the terms of their contract.

B.   The vendors are stakeholders, and you should determine who’ll do what activities in the project.

C.   The vendors are not stakeholders, but you should use conflict resolution to find the best solution for the contracted work.

D.   The vendors are project stakeholders, and you should utilize conflict resolution to find the best solution for the project.

20.   You are the project manager for your company. Your project sponsor has asked you to include interactive communications as part of your stakeholder management plan. Which one of the following best illustrates the concept of interactive communications in stakeholder management?

A.   Sending e-mail messages to select project stakeholders

B.   Creating a report on the project status

C.   Hosting a project status meeting

D.   Creating a secured project repository that only allowed stakeholders can access

21.   You are the project manager for your organization and you’re serving as a coach for several junior project managers. You’re currently reviewing the inputs for monitoring stakeholder engagement with your project team. The team members are confused about some of the inputs needed for monitoring stakeholder engagement. One of the inputs to monitoring stakeholder engagement is the issue log. How does the issue log help you prepare to monitor stakeholder engagement?

A.   This is false; this issue log is not an input to monitor stakeholder engagement.

B.   This issue log will help you determine which stakeholders are causing the project issues.

C.   The issue log is needed only when issues are defined by stakeholders.

D.   The issue log will help you track and respond to issues and communicate issue status.

22.   Your project sponsor has requested that you find a software package to serve as a central repository for all project information. They’d like for the software to capture, store, and provide data analysis on key performance metrics. The software should be able to help complete reports, analyze data, and track overall project performance. What is the project sponsor requesting?

A.   Reporting system

B.   Earned value management system

C.   Project management information system

D.   Integrated change control system

23.   As a project manager, you must use multiple types of communication with stakeholders to keep them engaged with the project work. All the following are types of communications that are related to stakeholder engagement except for which one?

A.   Pull communications

B.   Push communications

C.   Interactive communications

D.   Ad hoc communications

24.   Stakeholder engagement is key to a successful project, so you and the project team have created a stakeholder management plan that includes many different methods for engaging stakeholders. As part of your plan, you should also reference what other project management plan component?

A.   Project communications management plan

B.   Project procurement contracts

C.   Project scope statement

D.   Milestone charts for the project schedule

25.   You are the project manager of a new software development project in your company. Your company operates in a matrix environment and utilizes a project management office to structure projects. This current project has 78 stakeholders and will last for 18 months. Sam, one of the project stakeholders, informs you that two of his employees will be leaving the organization and will no longer be available as resources on your project. In addition to the project staffing management plan, what other document should you update?

A.   Stakeholder register

B.   Risk register

C.   Change log

D.   Project schedule

SELF TEST ANSWERS

1.   You are the project manager of the Server Update Project for your organization. This project has 543 stakeholders, many of which are end users. Some of the end users are critical of the server update because they’re concerned about where the data is stored, how they’ll access the data in the future, and their mapped drives. You’ve communicated with all the users that the server update will change how the users will access their files and home folders in the future. Now some of the end users have been complaining to their functional managers about the change. In this scenario, what type of stakeholders are the end users?

A.   Uninformed

B.   Negative

C.   Unresponsive

D.   Low influence/low interest

2.   Beth is the project manager of a new construction project for her organization’s client. This project will construct a new bridge in a major thoroughfare in her city. Beth is preparing for stakeholder identification because she wants to capture all the internal and external stakeholders who may influence and be influenced by this project. In her preparations, Beth will need all the following documents as inputs except for which one?

A.   Project charter

B.   Enterprise environmental factors

C.   Organizational process assets

D.   Risk management plan

3.   You are the project manager for a software development project for your company. This project will create a web-based application that will enable users to create maps for different hiking trails in North America. You’ll be working with developers who are employees of your company and developers who are contract-based. Your project will also include information from the National Parks Service, local communities, and hikers from around the United States. You and the project team will first complete stakeholder analysis to make certain that you’ve captured all the project stakeholders. What are the three logical steps to stakeholder analysis for this project?

A.   Identify the stakeholders, prioritize the stakeholders, anticipate stakeholder responses

B.   Identify the stakeholders, confirm the project scope, communicate the project plan

C.   Identify the stakeholders, anticipate stakeholder responses, create a response strategy

D.   Identify the stakeholders, meet with the stakeholders to address concerns, create a stakeholder response plan

4.   You have been working on a new project that will affect your entire organization of 1233 people. You and the project team know that you should create a stakeholder register for the stakeholders, but is it necessary to create 1233 entries in this register?

A.   Yes, all stakeholders should be identified.

B.   Yes, but it is appropriate to group the stakeholders for easier management.

C.   No; only the key stakeholders need to be identified in the stakeholder register.

D.   No; only negative stakeholders and key stakeholders must be documented in the stakeholder register.

5.   Mike is the project manager of a new software deployment project that will affect 3235 people in his organization. He’s communicated the deployment and explained the effect the software will have on the organization, and his plan includes training for the end users. Some of the stakeholders, especially the functional managers, are worried about the deployment and how it will affect the organization’s productivity. Anna, the project sponsor, asks Mike to create a visual diagram showing which stakeholders can affect the project the most based on their power in the organization. What chart should Mike create?

A.   Power/influence diagram

B.   Pareto diagram

C.   Tornado diagram

D.   Ishikawa diagram

6.   Harold is the project manager for a large construction project his company is completing for a client. This project has internal and external stakeholders, including members of the community who are opposed to the project, although it has been approved by the city. Harold is preparing to create a stakeholder management plan and he’s gathering several inputs for the plan’s creation. Which one of the following inputs will most help Harold create a strategy for stakeholder management and engagement?

A.   Project management plan

B.   Stakeholder register

C.   Enterprise environmental factors

D.   Communications management plan

7.   You are the project manager of a large software deployment project for your organization. This project will replace the operating systems on the computers of all employees. Many of the employees are in favor of this change in operating systems, while others are not. As part of your plan, you complete an analysis of the stakeholders. In this analysis, you and the project team have discovered that some of the project stakeholders didn’t know about the change in the company’s approved computer operating system. How would you classify these stakeholders?

A.   Unaware

B.   Uninformed

C.   Lacking

D.   Target for positive

8.   You are the project manager of a large software deployment project for your organization. This project will replace the operating systems on the computers of all employees. Many of the employees are in favor of this change in operating systems, while others are not. As part of your plan, you complete an analysis of the stakeholders. In this analysis, you and the project team have also learned that the functional managers are not in favor of the change of the operating system for their employees’ laptops. How would you classify these stakeholders?

A.   Neutral

B.   Resistant

C.   Leading

D.   Hesitant

9.   What is the purpose of the stakeholder management plan?

A.   To convert all stakeholders to positive, supportive stakeholders

B.   To identify the stakeholders who are opposed to the project

C.   To manage the stakeholders’ attitudes toward the project

D.   To communicate with the stakeholders about the project status

10.   Morgan is the project manager of a web site creation project for a client. Some employees at the client’s site are excited about the change and they are helpful with Morgan’s plan for the new web site design. In the stakeholder management plan, Morgan has identified the tactics for managing the stakeholders, and she has identified the positive stakeholders with which categorization?

A.   Happy

B.   Leading

C.   Supportive

D.   Informed

11.   You are a project manager for your company and you’ve just created the project’s stakeholder management plan. This plan is based on organizational process assets and enterprise environmental factors that you’re required to use in the project. The stakeholder management plan includes all the following components except for which one?

A.   The relationships among the stakeholders

B.   The relationships among the project team

C.   The schedule of stakeholder information distribution

D.   Communication requirements for stakeholders

12.   Sam is the project manager of the GHQ Project for his company, and he’s recently discovered a scheduling conflict with two of the vendors on the project. Sam knows that the conflict will likely cause a two-week delay in the completion of the project. What should Sam do?

A.   Report the problem to management.

B.   Report the problem to the stakeholders.

C.   Say nothing unless the delay becomes greater than two weeks.

D.   Propose a solution to management.

13.   You are the project manager of a large project in your company. Your project has been in motion for three months and you’re about to move into the first phase of project execution. Your sponsor calls to report that you’ve apparently overlooked some stakeholders during the project’s planning phase. What should you do now?

A.   Immediately contact the stakeholders, apologize, and analyze the stakeholders.

B.   Begin the project execution but contact the stakeholders for a meeting.

C.   Determine whether the oversight has damaged the project’s objectives.

D.   Schedule a meeting with the stakeholders to catch them up on the project.

14.   Steve is the project manager of a new project that will affect 4534 people in his organization. Some of the stakeholders are not happy about the project, but they understand the need for the project work. How should Steve manage these unhappy but compliant stakeholders?

A.   Ignore their complaints.

B.   Explain the benefits of the project.

C.   Categorize them as resistant.

D.   Some stakeholders may just be unhappy.

15.   Marvin is the project manager of a new project for his company. He’s been working with the project team and the project sponsor to keep the stakeholders engaged. As part of this process, Marvin will need four inputs to stakeholder engagement. Which one of the following is not one of the inputs for stakeholder engagement?

A.   Change log

B.   Organizational process assets

C.   Communications management plan

D.   Quality management plan

16.   You are the project manager of a large project that will affect how your organization accepts and processes orders from customers. Many of the stakeholders have strong opinions about the project and how it should proceed. Thomas, the manufacturing manager, and Jane, the sales manager, have been in conflict with each other over some of the project’s requirements. You’ve met with these two stakeholders to identify their differences, negotiate a resolution, and come to an agreement about the requirements in the project. What stakeholder engagement tool and technique have you used effectively in this scenario? Choose the best answer.

A.   Active listening

B.   Stakeholder resolution

C.   Management skills

D.   Interpersonal skills

17.   One of the tools you’ll have to use as a project manager in the stakeholder management knowledge area is management skill. Management skills help you organize stakeholder concerns and keep the project moving forward. All the following are examples of management skills except for which one?

A.   Presenting project information

B.   Negotiating with stakeholders

C.   Public speaking

D.   Analyzing work performance information

18.   You are the project manager of the JNH Project for your company. This project is scheduled to last 18 months and will affect 435 stakeholders in your organization. The project has sensitive information that only certain stakeholders should have access to, so you’ve created a plan for communicating the information to the correct parties throughout the project through special e-mail bulletins. What type of communication is secured e-mail considered to be?

A.   Push

B.   Interactive

C.   Sensitive

D.   Passive

19.   You are the project manager for your organization, and you’ve contracted two organizations to complete parts of the project. The project requires that these two different companies work together on parts of the project. One of the vendors will need to install network cables throughout a building, while the other company is responsible for connecting the networking cables to a central patch panel and to the individual networking receptacles. The vendors disagree about how the work should take place. What’s the best approach to manage this scenario?

A.   The vendors are not stakeholders and must live up to the terms of their contract.

B.   The vendors are stakeholders, and you should determine who’ll do what activities in the project.

C.   The vendors are not stakeholders, but you should use conflict resolution to find the best solution for the contracted work.

D.   The vendors are project stakeholders, and you should utilize conflict resolution to find the best solution for the project

20.   You are the project manager for your company. Your project sponsor has asked you to include interactive communications as part of your stakeholder management plan. Which one of the following best illustrates the concept of interactive communications in stakeholder management?

A.   Sending e-mail messages to select project stakeholders

B.   Creating a report on the project status

C.   Hosting a project status meeting

D.   Creating a secured project repository that only allowed stakeholders can access

21.   You are the project manager for your organization and you’re serving as a coach for several junior project managers. You’re currently reviewing the inputs for monitoring stakeholder engagement with your project team. The team members are confused about some of the inputs needed for monitoring stakeholder engagement. One of the inputs to monitoring stakeholder engagement is the issue log. How does the issue log help you prepare to monitor stakeholder engagement?

A.   This is false; this issue log is not an input to monitor stakeholder engagement.

B.   This issue log will help you determine which stakeholders are causing the project issues.

C.   The issue log is needed only when issues are defined by stakeholders.

D.   The issue log will help you track and respond to issues and communicate issue status.

22.   Your project sponsor has requested that you find a software package to serve as a central repository for all project information. They’d like for the software to capture, store, and provide data analysis on key performance metrics. The software should be able to help complete reports, analyze data, and track overall project performance. What is the project sponsor requesting?

A.   Reporting system

B.   Earned value management system

C.   Project management information system

D.   Integrated change control system

23.   As a project manager, you must use multiple types of communication with stakeholders to keep them engaged with the project work. All the following are types of communications that are related to stakeholder engagement except for which one?

A.   Pull communications

B.   Push communications

C.   Interactive communications

D.   Ad hoc communications

24.   Stakeholder engagement is key to a successful project, so you and the project team have created a stakeholder management plan that includes many different methods for engaging stakeholders. As part of your plan, you should also reference what other project management plan component?

A.   Project communications management plan

B.   Project procurement contracts

C.   Project scope statement

D.   Milestone charts for the project schedule

25.   You are the project manager of a new software development project in your company. Your company operates in a matrix environment and utilizes a project management office to structure projects. This current project has 78 stakeholders and will last for 18 months. Sam, one of the project stakeholders, informs you that two of his employees will be leaving the organization and will no longer be available as resources on your project. In addition to the project staffing management plan, what other document should you update?

A.   Stakeholder register

B.   Risk register

C.   Change log

D.   Project schedule