We’re continuing a series of posts concerning the project management best practice processes described in the Project Management Institute’s Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide). So far we’ve covered Develop Project Charter, Identify Stakeholders, and Plan Stakeholder Engagement. This post addresses Manage Stakeholder Engagement.

What’s the purpose of Manage Stakeholder Engagement?

Identify Stakeholders identifies, classifies and prioritizes the stakeholders. Plan Stakeholder Engagement creates the Stakeholder Engagement Plan, which describes which stakeholders will be engaged, and in what way. Manage Stakeholder Engagement is simply the implementation of the Stakeholder Engagement Plan.


It helps to ensure that stakeholders clearly understand the project goals, objectives, benefits, and risks for the project, as well as how their contribution will enhance project success.

Why is Stakeholder Engagement important?

Aside from the fact that engaged stakeholders are ultimately easier to monitor and manage, engagement is critically important for managing stakeholder expectations.

A project manager is rarely able to fulfill all the stakeholder requirements. (Some requirements may even be mutually exclusive.) But a project manager can meet stakeholder expectations, if he/she works to clearly set those expectation at the start of the project, and then carefully works to manage those expectations throughout the project.

Who performs Plan Stakeholder Engagement?

The project manager, and project team members, must actively engage stakeholders throughout the project. However, sometimes other stakeholders can be leveraged to help engage the wider universe of stakeholders e.g. designated change agents, or department leads/representatives.

Interested to know more about this process?

Check out one of our project management best practices courses.