Post-kickoff, the project manager is at the center of several streams of responsibility that move forward in parallel. The stakeholder cycle continues with deeper engagement—identifying, understanding, analyzing, prioritizing, and monitoring stakeholders while beginning requirements elicitation with key players. Governance structures are revisited, confirming roles, thresholds, and decision-making authority as planning progresses. At the same time, objectives, priorities, and success criteria are refined in collaboration with stakeholders, building the foundation for baselines. Team focus grows as roles are clarified, training and readiness needs are addressed, and a collaborative culture is established. Across all of this, the project manager leans on power skills—leadership, influence, conflict management, and emotional intelligence—to guide the team, foster trust, and maintain alignment. These responsibilities—stakeholder engagement, governance, planning, and power skills—are interdependent and form the core of how the PM steers the project forward from initiation into detailed planning and execution.
1.6.0 Build a team (PMP Exam Content Outline)
- 1.6.1 Appraise stakeholder skills
- 1.6.2 Deduce project resource requirements
- 1.6.3 Continuously assess and refresh team skills to meet project needs
- 1.6.4 Maintain team and knowledge transfer
According to pmi.org (the Project Management Institute), a stakeholder is an individual, group, or organization who may affect, be affected by or perceive itself to be affected by a decision, activity, or outcome of a project.
Related post:
In the above video I noted that “Deduce Project Resource Requirements” is a first, high-level take on the resources you’ll need. The Oxford dictionary defines deduce as: arrive at (a fact or a conclusion) by reasoning; draw as a logical conclusion. You’re working with:
- Initial high-level requirements or deliverables
- Project charter
- Preliminary scope
- Maybe some early roadmaps or phasing assumptions
Check out my related post here.
When you deduce the project resource requirements, you’re reasoning from the type of project and its known components. For example:
- If it’s a software rollout, you might deduce you’ll need developers, testers, trainers, and support staff.
- If it’s a construction project, you might deduce you’ll need engineers, architects, heavy machinery, and permits.
Later, when the WBS is created, you’ll validate and refine the resource needs based on actual work packages. This early deduction is part of exploratory planning—meant to inform scope, schedule, and budget planning, not finalize them.
So eventually (especially if your are using the predictive approach) you would create a WBS, decomposing the work into sub-chunks and sub-chunks. This is what a WBS might look like:
Though not shown here, note that the WBS would always document 100% of the work, including quality related work, compliance related work, transition related work, readiness related work, project management related work — EVERYTHING. When I’ve used a WBS, I always said “The WBS helps me sleep at night.”
The WBS decomposes high-level scope into smaller deliverables (NOUNS). This breakdown gives the team and stakeholders a shared view of the work involved.
The WBS, then is a structuring tool that helps us to ultimately define scope. Once the WBS is created, the “Define Scope” process finalizes the Scope Baseline, or 5cope Baseline as I like to say, which can include:
- The refined Project Scope Statement
- The finalized WBS
- The WBS Dictionary
- Any identified Planning Packages
- Work packages (lowest level of the WBS)
This approach also aligns with rolling wave planning, where early elaboration of high-level deliverables helps inform what the actual scope should be. It supports progressive elaboration and encourages collaboration and early alignment.
After understanding the NOUNS (scope management) we move to the VERBS: all those lovely activities. Work packages from the lowest level of the WBS are decomposed into activities that go into an Activity List. These activities can be copy/pasted into 2 spreadsheets:
- Activity Duration Estimates
- Activity Cost Estimates
We also:
- Sequence Activities
- and estimate our needed resources
In short from the NOUNS, the WHATs, we can make VERBS – our activities – that turn into WHENs, WHOs and HOW MUCHs.
In the next 2 videos I reference the DIKW Model. Here is what that model looks like:
