Engage Stakeholders

Engagement starts before the project charter is signed and never really stops. PMI expects you to know the classic classification tools: the power/interest grid (manage closely, keep satisfied, keep informed, monitor) and the broader salience model (power, legitimacy, urgency).

A high-power, low-interest stakeholder gets kept satisfied, not managed closely — over-engaging them wastes their time and yours. A low-power, high-interest stakeholder gets kept informed; ignoring them is a common cause of scope resistance later. Exam questions often disguise this as a scenario ("a senior executive rarely responds to project updates but has final budget authority") and expect you to correctly classify before choosing an action.

Study focus: stakeholder identification and analysis is iterative — new stakeholders appear as the project moves through phases, and the register needs to be revisited, not written once.