PMP - People (42% of the exam) - Section 1.2

Empower team members, support team performance, and ensure stakeholders are adequately trained by delegating authority and recognising individual contributions.

Empower the team by organising work around their strengths, delegating decision-making authority to the lowest responsible level, and supporting self-organising agile teams. Support performance by measuring against agreed metrics, recognising and rewarding contributions, and verifying that team members and stakeholders have the competencies the project requires, arranging training where a gap exists.

DelegationSelf-organising teamsRecognition and rewardsCompetency development

Practice question for this objective

Free samplePeoplemedium

A hybrid project will hand a new analytics platform to a business operations group at go-live. During planning the project manager learns that the operations staff have never used a tool of this kind, and the sponsor assumes they will simply pick it up on the day. The project manager is responsible for ensuring stakeholders are adequately trained. What should the project manager do FIRST?

ARecord in the risk register that the group may struggle, and revisit the training question only if problems appear after go-live.
BBook every operations staff member onto the vendor's full multi-day certification course to be certain no skill is missed.
CAsk the sponsor to sign a statement accepting responsibility for any shortfall in the operations group's readiness at go-live.
DAssess the operations group's current competencies against what the platform requires, then plan targeted training to close the gap before go-live. Correct

Ensure stakeholders are trained by first assessing the competency gap, then planning proportionate targeted training before handover. Effective training starts from a gap analysis so effort matches need; assessing current versus required competencies is what turns a vague readiness worry into a proportionate, deliverable training plan.

Why A is wrong: Logging a risk is reasonable housekeeping, but waiting for problems to surface after go-live is reactive and skips the project manager's duty to prepare stakeholders in advance.

Why B is wrong: Maximum training sounds thorough, but committing to a full certification without assessing need is gold-plating that wastes budget and time the assessment might show are unnecessary.

Why C is wrong: Transferring blame to the sponsor may feel protective, but it dodges the project manager's own accountability for training and does nothing to make the stakeholders competent.

Why D is correct: Correct: identifying the skills gap first lets the project manager plan proportionate, targeted training so stakeholders are genuinely ready, which is the responsibility the objective describes.

See more PMP practice questions, answers explained.

Exam traps in People

Answers that look right on this material and are not. Each one is a distractor from a different question in the PMP bank for this domain.

Schedule a single all-hands demonstration in the final week before go-live so the system is fresh in everyone's mind.
Why it is wrong: A last-minute demo is easy to arrange, but one late session cannot close identified competency gaps and leaves no time to confirm the operators can actually use the system.
Schedule longer working hours so that the backlog of approvals awaiting their sign-off is cleared more quickly each day.
Why it is wrong: Working longer treats the symptom by pushing more decisions through the same single point, but it keeps the project manager as the bottleneck and leaves the team dependent rather than empowered.
Schedule a single broad orientation session for all client staff and treat attendance as evidence that they are trained.
Why it is wrong: A one-off session is easy to arrange and shows visible activity, but treating attendance as proof of competence ignores whether the identified gaps were actually closed, so users may still be unable to operate the system.

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