People Domain
Exam weight: 33% of PMP exam questions
Related principles
ECO Tasks and Enablers
Task 1: Develop a common vision
- Help ensure a shared vision with key stakeholders.
- Promote the shared vision.
- Keep the vision current.
- Break down situations to identify the root cause of a misunderstanding of the vision.
Task 2: Manage conflicts
- Identify conflict sources.
- Analyze the context for the conflict.
- Communicate conflict management principles with the team and external stakeholders.
- Establish an environment that fosters adherence to common ground rules.
- Manage and rectify ground rule violations.
- Implement an agreed-on resolution strategy.
Task 3: Lead the project team
- Establish expectations at the team level.
- Empower the team.
- Solve problems.
- Represent the voice of the team.
- Support the team’s varied experiences, skills, and perspectives.
- Determine an appropriate leadership style.
- Establish clear roles and responsibilities within the team.
Task 4: Engage stakeholders
- Identify stakeholders.
- Analyze stakeholders.
- Analyze and tailor communication to stakeholder needs.
- Execute the stakeholder engagement plan.
- Optimize alignment among stakeholder needs, expectations, and project objectives.
- Build trust and influence stakeholders to accomplish project objectives.
Task 5: Align stakeholder expectations
- Categorize stakeholders.
- Identify stakeholder expectations.
- Facilitate discussions to align expectations.
- Organize and act on mentoring opportunities.
Task 6: Manage stakeholder expectations
- Identify internal and external customer expectations.
- Align and maintain outcomes to internal and external customer expectations.
- Monitor internal and external customer satisfaction/expectations and respond as needed.
Task 7: Help ensure knowledge transfer
- Identify knowledge critical to the project.
- Gather knowledge.
- Foster an environment for knowledge transfer.
Task 8: Plan and manage communication
- Define a communication strategy.
- Promote transparency and collaboration.
- Establish a feedback loop.
- Understand reporting requirements.
- Create reports aligned with sponsors and stakeholder expectations.
- Support reporting and governance processes.
Exam angle
- Conflict management: PMI consistently favors confronting/problem-solving (collaborative) over avoiding, accommodating, or immediately escalating — wrong answers escalate before the PM has tried to resolve it at the lowest level
- Leadership style: situational leadership — wrong = always apply servant leadership regardless of context; right = match style to team maturity (directing for new team, delegating for experienced self-organizing team)
- Knowledge transfer trap: wrong = document lessons learned only at project end; right = knowledge transfer is continuous throughout the project (retrospectives, lessons learned register updated in real time)
- Stakeholder alignment: when stakeholders disagree on scope or direction, wrong = take the sponsor’s side automatically; right = facilitate discussion, surface trade-offs, achieve shared understanding
- Task 7 (knowledge transfer) in agile: retrospectives are the primary knowledge transfer mechanism — not a formal lessons learned document