I would argue that stakeholder engagement is the most important element of the core project management skill set. We do projects with people and for people. And the risks that arise often trace back to how people do or do not respond to events. So, here is my giant guide to the project management stakeholder engagement domain.
Stakeholder Engagement or Stakeholder Management?
For much of my career, we spoke of stakeholder management, in much the same way as we talked about risk management, cost management, schedule management, and so on. When PMI finally got around to recognizing its importance, ridiculously late, in it’s 2017 6th edition of its Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, it added Project Stakeholder Management as the 10th knowledge area (KA).
PMI had finally woken up and, in the PMBOK Guide 6th edition, they say:
The ability of the project manager and team to correctly identify and engage all stakeholders in an appropriate way can mean the difference between project success and failure.
Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, 6th Edition (PMBOK Guide)
Chapter 13: Project Stakeholder Management
Published by the Project Management Institute, 2017
Things have moved on.
In the Association for Project Management Body of Knowledge, 8th edition (2015), section 4.1 is titled Stakeholder Engagement. And PMI’s 7th edition of its PMBOK Guide introduced 8 Performance Domains, of which one was the Stakeholder Performance Domain. At the time of writing, it looks like the forthcoming 8th edition will retain the concept of Performance Domains, but revert to 7 domains that look a lot more like seven of the 6th edition’s 10 Knowledge Areas. The only performance domain that will (nearly) retain a name from the 7th edition is the Stakeholders Performance Domain.
We’ve published a lot of articles touching on project stakeholder engagement. So, why another one?
Who this Guide is for
This article is designed as an overarching guide to the topic of Project Stakeholder Engagement. I’ve designed it for:
- New Project Managers who want a first introduction to the topic
- Aspiring PMI PMP and CAPM candidates who want a guide that relates to their syllabus, broadly following the PMI’s approach (but beware: not slavishly so).
- Aspiring APM PFQ and PMQ candidates who want a guide that relates to their syllabus, broadly following the APM’s approach (but beware: not slavishly so).
- Aspiring PRINCE2 candidates who want a guide that relates to their syllabus, and fills in some of the gaps in PRINCE2’s limited coverage of stakeholder engagement.
- More experienced Project Managers who want a structured refresher on the topic, with plenty of links to more detailed content.
What’s in this Guide
The ‘Identify Stakeholders’ process includes identifying and analyzing your stakeholders. But I prefer to split these two out as separate processes. So, you’ll see two separate sections in the contents below.
Contents
- Introduction to Project Stakeholder Management
- Where Does the Term ‘Stakeholder’ Come from?
- Approaches to Project Stakeholder Engagement
- Identify Stakeholders
- Analyze Stakeholders
- Plan Stakeholder Engagement
- Action: Manage Stakeholder Engagement
- Review: Monitor Stakeholder Engagement
- Further Thoughts on Project Stakeholder Engagement
Introduction to Project Stakeholder Management
Let’s start at the very beginning, by defining what we mean by the word Stakeholder,
What is a Stakeholder?
My preferred definition is the simplest possible.
Stakeholder: anyone who has any interest in what you are doing.
The Influence Agenda: A Systematic Approach to Aligning Stakeholders in Times of Change
Author: Mike Clayton | Publisher: Palgrave Mcmillan, 2014
However, you may need to understand the perspectives of other organizations. So, I’ll offer some alternatives. And I’ll present them in order of increasing verbosity (number of words).
But, I think you’ll agree, they all say the same thing!
APM
An individual or group that has an interest or role in the project, programme or portfolio, or is impacted by it.
APM Body of Knowledge, 8th Edition
Glossary
Published by the Association for Project Management, 2025
PRINCE2
An individual, group, or organization that can affect or be affected by (or perceives itself to be affected by), the project.
PRINCE2, 7th edition: Managing Successful Projects
Glossary
Published by PeopleCert, 2023
PMI
An individual, group, or organization that may affect, be affected by, or perceive itself to be affected by a decision, activity, or outcome of a project, program, or portfolio.
Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, 7th Edition (PMBOK Guide)
Glossary
Published by the Project Management Institute, 2021
I do rather like the acknowledgement by PMI and PRINCE2 that perception matters as much as reality, in this context.
Where Does the Term ‘Stakeholder’ Come from?
By the way, have you ever wondered where we get the word ‘stakeholder’ from? I researched it for my book, ‘The Influence Agenda’, and made this short video, describing the history of the word.
What is Project Stakeholder Engagement and Why Do We Prefer the Term to Stakeholder Management?
I’ll explain why in this short video…
Approaches to Project Stakeholder Engagement
In this section, I will consider 4 (very similar) approaches to Stakeholder Engagement, from:
- My own book, The Influence Agenda
- PMI’s Process Groups: A Practice Guide
- APM’s Body of Knowledge, 8th Edition
- PRINCE2 (7) and MSP (Managing Successful Programmes)
The Influence Agenda: A Systematic Approach to Aligning Stakeholders in Times of Change
The Influence Agenda is my own book about stakeholder engagement. In it, I work from 5 steps, which also form the basis of how I describe the stakeholder engagement process in all of the OnlinePMCourses training. These steps are:
- Identify
The two parts of this are to identify your stakeholders and your stakeholder engagement goals. - Analyse
The two parts of this are to analyze your stakeholders and the resources available to you, to engage with them. - Plan
The two parts of this are to plan the actions you will take (your engagement process) and the messages you will deliver. - Act
The two parts of this are to engage with your stakeholders and to handle any resistance you encounter. - Review
The two parts of this are to monitor the effectiveness and consequences of your stakeholder engagement and to exert control by making changes. There are three review cycles:- The Maintenance Cycle reviews your engagement plans to ensure they remain as effective as possible
- The Persuasion Cycle reviews your stakeholder analysis to ensure you can update your engagement approaches to match your emerging understanding of your stakeholders
- The Response Cycle reviews the project context to identify new stakeholders or draw in any that you have previously missed.
Here is a video that covers my approach to managing stakeholder engagement.
The PMI Approach to Stakeholder Engagement
The PMI’s approach started life in The PMBOK Guide 6th edition and now lives in its Practice Guide, Process Groups: A Practice Guide.
The PMI takes a very standard approach to Stakeholder Engagement. There are four processes that match my own, if you consider that the first process merges my steps 1 and 2.
- Identify Stakeholders
Identify and understand the interests, influence, interdependencies, and possible impact of your stakeholders. PMI advises us that we should be ‘identifying all stakeholders, not just a limited set’. Really – when did any credible PM ever recommend ignoring any stakeholders? - Plan Stakeholder Engagement
Develop your approach to engaging your stakeholders. PMI advocates involving all team members in stakeholder engagement. Of course you should. Why wouldn’t you? - Manage Stakeholder Engagement
Communicating and working with your stakeholders. - Monitor Stakeholder Engagement
Monitor your stakeholder relationships and tailor your strategies as you go. Here, PMI recommends reviewing your stakeholder community often. They liken this to risk management reviews and I’ve been teaching this for 20 years.
The APMBoK on Stakeholder Engagement
As you would expect, if you’ve read my review of the 7th Edition of the APM’s Body of Knowledge, APM takes a different approach to PMI. The approach is complementary but far less prescriptive. In the current 8th edition, the description of the stakeholder engagement process is very much an outline, but similar to the PMI’s and my own approaches:
- Identify
- Analyse
- Plan
- Act
- Review
The similarity with my own approach is not coincidental. I was commissioned tow write around half of the content of the 8th edition, including this section. However, the overall content does not differ greatly from the 7th edition, on which I was asked to base this part of my writing.
Section 4.1, Stakeholder Engagement, sits within a wider chapter called People and Behaviours. It consists of four topics:
- Engagement Planning
This covers the stakeholder engagement process - Social Context
Navigating social and political complexity - Facilitation
Making it easy to collaborate and solve problems - Communication
Ensuring the exchange of relevant information
The topic on Conflict Resolution from the 7th edition has been expanded into a whole section, covering conflict and negotiation.
The APMBoK assumes a certain level of PM knowledge and experience. It doesn’t attempt to offer a basic guide to this (or any other) topic. But, for serious project management professionals, it is an excellent reference. Do take a look at it.
PRINCE2 7 and MSP on Stakeholder Engagement
To say that PRINCE2 7 is light on its coverage of stakeholder engagement would be to understate the case. Arguably, it is negligent. Arguably, this does make sense. PRINCE2 is not so much about ‘how to manage a project’ as about how to impose good governance on your projects. Therefore, core knowledge areas and toolsets like stakeholder engagement are not within its purview.
MSP on Stakeholder Engagement
Managing Successful Programmes (MSP) is a companion methodology to PRINCE2, which focuses on Program Management. In it, we see a six-step process for stakeholder engagement:
- Identifying stakeholders
- Creating and analyzing stakeholder profiles
- Defining the stakeholder engagement approach
- Planning the engagements
- Engaging stakeholders
- Measuring effectiveness
MSP offers us a number of useful checklists, diagrams, and tables. The guidebook to MSP makes an excellent reference for project managers moving beyond the basics.
A Comparison of Approaches and Terminology
Identify Stakeholders
The Project Stakeholder Management process starts with identifying who your stakeholders are. And the best advice I can give is to draw your net as widely as possible. You’ll later be able to prioritize them, so minimize the risk of missing any by looking within and outside your organization for anyone with any interest at all, in your project.
There are plenty more approaches you can take, like brainstorming and brainwriting, questionnaires and surveys. Why not start with a pre-made list of basic stakeholders. You’ll find some online, and we have a list of 127 in our list, within our Project Checklists kit.
Click here to open your free PDF Stakeholder Checklist in a new window. You’ll be able to download it from there.
Analyze Stakeholders
Once we know who our stakeholders are, we need to understand them. In PMI’s Process Guide, this is part of the Identify Stakeholders process. But it is a substantial and important task. Big enough to merit its own stage in most methodologies.
Your analysis requires you to look at what we know about each stakeholder, and make reasonable working assumptions, where you lack knowledge. The sort of things that will interest us about them include:
- Interest
What interest each stakeholder or stakeholder group has in your project - Power and formal authority
How much the stakeholder can compel certain decisions - Influence and informal authority
Their strength of character and ability to persuade - Rights
Any legal or moral rights with regard to the project or its impacts – this includes asset ownership - Attitude
How does the stakeholder view the project – do they see it as beneficial, detrimental, or neutral to their interests - Knowledge and expertise
What does the stakeholder know, and what can they do to support or oppose the project? - Contribution
In what other ways can they support or oppose the project? - Motivation
To what extent are they likely to support or oppose the project?
Stakeholder Analysis Methodologies
The PMBOK Guide offers four tools (plus prioritization, which we’ll return to) for analyzing your stakeholders:
- Two-dimensional grids
- Three-dimensional grid (cube)
- Salience model
- Directions of influence
If you are studying for PMP or CAPM, then do read these carefully and look up further details. For more information about stakeholder analysis, please do take a look at our videos and detailed article:
- What Goes into a Full Stakeholder Analysis? | Video
- The Top 20 Stakeholder Analysis Techniques All PMs Should Know
- My Top 6 Stakeholder Analysis Tools | Video
Prioritization
Stakeholder engagement is vitally important. Yet, in the real world of limited resources, you will need to prioritize which stakeholders get the bulk of your attention. We use these analysis tools to determine which are most important to the long-term success of our project. Or, as PMI points out, which need your attention to best avoid costly errors or failures!
Plan Stakeholder Engagement
Now it is time to build a plan. While the MSP stakeholder engagement process distinguishes your strategy (how you will engage and what you are going to communicate) from your plan (when you will engage), I don’t see this precise distinction as quite right.
A Strategic Approach to Stakeholder Engagement
For each stakeholder, what will be your strategy? Not the tactical detail of how you will engage, but what are you seeking to achieve? That should give you the approach to take. For example, your priority may be to:
- learn from them
- influence them
- inform them
- instruct them
I’ve created a full article on this topic:
Developing a Stakeholder Engagement Plan
This is another big topic, which I have covered in detail in its own article:
- Stakeholder Engagement Strategies: Don’t Miss 40-plus Ways to Power up Your Project
- How to Plan an Effective Stakeholder Engagement Campaign
- How to Plan Your Stakeholder Engagement Campaign
- Agony Angels: So many Stakeholders – Stakeholder Engagement with Dawn Mahan
Action: Manage Stakeholder Engagement
We have replaced the term stakeholder management with stakeholder engagement. But I think we also need the term Stakeholder Engagement Management for the process of managing your stakeholder engagement process: working your plan.
The Stakeholder Engagement Skillset
Good stakeholder engagement – like so much of Project Management – is all about communication. PMI, APM, and my own book, The Influence Agenda, all identify core skills. Taking everything together, the superset makes a good list.
- Cultural Awareness (PMI, TIA)
- Questioning (TIA)
- Observation (including listening) (PMI, TIA)
- Conversation and Collaboration (PMI, TIA)
- Storytelling (TIA)
- Influence and Persuasion (APM, TIA)
- Facilitation (APM)
- Negotiation (PMI)
- Copywriting (TIA)
- Conflict Management/Resolution and Handling Resistance (PMI, APM, TIA)
- Political Awareness/Acumen (including social context) (PMI, APM, TIA)
- Crisis Management (TIA)
Take a look at:
- How to Do Stakeholder Engagement Management | Video
- Stakeholder Engagement: How to Make it Work Effectively in Hybrid Work Environments
Dealing with Challenging Stakeholders
I often find that there is one thing project managers fear most. And that is dealing with difficult stakeholders and handling the inevitable resistance and objections we get when we set out to create change.
We have great articles and videos to help you with this.
- 4 Steps to Engage Difficult Stakeholders
The first is a guest article from the fabulous Elise Stevens. - How to Handle Stakeholder Objections
The second looks at different reasons why stakeholders resist, and how to deal with them. - Why Resistance is a Good Thing | Video
- How to Implement Change… in the Face of Resistance to Change
Review: Monitor Stakeholder Engagement
The Monitor and Review Cycle is the beating heart of a project during the delivery stage. And likewise, it’s a crucial part of your project stakeholder engagement management process.
The PMI Practice Guide says disappointingly little about this stage. I like to think in terms of three review cycles, which I discuss in detail, in The Influence Agenda.
- The Maintenance Cycle
Reviewing your plan after you have taken action and adjusting it accordingly. - The Persuasion Cycle
Reviewing your analysis if your plans are not working. The likely reason is that you got your assessment of the stakeholder wrong. This is also the cycle where you review your prioritization based on new information. - The Response Cycle
This is a periodic review to look for new stakeholders who have either emerged onto the scene, or who were there… but you omitted them.
Evaluating Your Project Stakeholder Management Performance
MSP says virtually nothing (less than 200 words) on this. The PMI Practice Guide says precisely nothing about this. But this is another big topic, and a somewhat advanced one. I discuss it in full, in The Influence Agenda. There, I offer a simple 7-step process:
- Determine the terms of reference for your review
- Develop evaluation criteria against which to evaluate performance
- Collect your data
- Analyze your data
- Present your report and recommendations
- Learn from the process
- Use the review results to further embed good stakeholder engagement practices into your culture
Although it does not address stakeholder engagement directly, if this topic interests you, you might like our article, ‘Project Management Review: A Guide to Project Audit and Assurance‘.
Further Thoughts on Project Stakeholder Engagement
If you want to take your study of project stakeholder engagement further, we have more articles that offer different takes on the topic:
- Stakeholder Leadership: Leading Bystanders as well as Followers
- Good Customer Service: How to Keep Your Client and Stakeholders Happy
- The Game of Projects: How to Win at Project Politics
- Podcast: Politics and Stakeholders
Some Final Tips for Good Stakeholder Engagement
What are Your Thoughts on Project Stakeholder Engagement?
I’d love to hear your experiences, questions, or insights about stakeholder engagement. Please do use the comments, below, and I’ll look forward to responding to every contribution.
