Project Manager Interview Questions,latest Project Manager Interview Questions,Project Manager Interview Questions 2011
- There was a situation where more than one-way to accomplish the same task. Your onsite tech lead and offshore tech lead has different opinions about doing this and the feelings were very strong. Both are very important to you. How do you react to this?
- What are the practices you follow for project close out? Assume you are into a product customization for a customer and the application has gone live. How do you close this project?
- Your team is in between iteration. Your customer wants few more items to be delivered in that iteration which you are working now. How do you react to your customer?
- You are at the customer's place and your application is in UAT/stabilization phase. Your customer comes up with a change request and says that it's a minor one and he wants to see it in the next release. What will be your response/approach to your customer?
- What is velocity? How do you estimate your team's velocity?
- What is earned value management? Why do you need it?
- Describe the type of manager you prefer.
- What are your team-player qualities? Give examples.
- How do you prioritize your tasks when there isn't time to complete them all?
- How do you stay focused when faced with a major deadline?
- Are you able to cope with more than one job at a time?
- In your opinion, why do software projects fail?
- Your customer wants a bug to be delivered at EOD. You have got the BUG/CR information in the morning. It will not be possible to develop, completely regress this issue and deliver it at EOD. How do you approach this issue?
- You are following Waterfall as your development methodology and you have estimated X days for design phase. Your customer is not ready to accept this. How do you convince your customer to have X number of days for design phase?
- You have to sell agile practices (XP/Scrum) to your organization. Your management is very reluctant to change. You are sure that if you do not change to agile, it will be very tough to survive. What will be your approach?
- How do you set and manage expectations (with customers, your managers and your team)?
- For some reason you've encountered a delay on an early phase of your project. What actions can you take to counter the delay?
- What is Function point analysis? Why do you need it?
- What is the difference between EO and EQ? What is FTR?
- You are estimating using Function point analysis for a distributed n-tier application. How do you factor the complexity for distributed n-tier application? Does FP Provides support for it?
- You are getting Adjusted Function point count. How do you convert it into Effort?
- How do you manage difficult people/problem employees?
- How do you build your teams morale?
- How do you estimate your SCRUM/XP Projects? How do you define velocity for the first couple of iterations? What is a load factor?
- What is team building? What are the stages in team building? Do you consider it as an important thing? Why?
- What are some of your lessons learn with your previous iteration delivered? How do you use your lessons learnt in your iteration planning?
- Can you describe this position to me in detail, why you believe you are qualified for this position, and why you are interested in it?
- Can you describe this company to me as if I were an investor?
- How do you get your team working on the same project goal?
- What do you do when a project is initiated and given to you and you have a gut feeling the scope is too large for the budget and the time-line?
- What formal project management training have you received, where did you attend, and what have you learned from it?
- We are very soiled, can you explain how you operate inter departmentally?
- Consider that you are in a diverse environment, out of your comfort zone. How would you rate your situational leadership style? Give me examples.
- You may also be presented with a couple of case studies. For instance, 'What if a key employee falls sick at a critical time of project delivery?' and etc.
- My favorite questions are the "Tell me about a time when..." questions. Make sure you have stories about projects you participated in or managed. Especially share stories of those that had a difficulty to overcome (eg: budget or time constraint blown) and how the difficulty was managed in order to bring the project to a successful conclusion, or how the project was closed down before damaging the stakeholders.
- How stakeholder expectation is managed?
- How internal and external project risk is managed (quantitatively if possible)
- How organizational change is managed (involving the stakeholders that will experience change in their lives as a result of the project),
- How 'scope management' is done, when the project has not been scoped properly - this is not scope creep I am talking about, merely the fact that the user, client and management learns what they really want as the project progresses nine times out of ten - incidentally, glib answers like 'We use RAD, spiral models, prototypes only indicate that the candidate knows of such things, and not that they know how to use them,
- What needs to be reported to stakeholders, when and how the data is collected - I normally focus on financial management techniques here - does the PM know how to use the GL, does the PM understand signing powers, how is overtime managed and used, etc.
- How does delegation work - you don't want a PM that does technical work(domain specific work) - the PM should manage the project (not always practical, but it sounds nice anyway),
- How does the interface between line management and the Project work - Can the PM negotiate with Middle and Senior resource managers when interests conflict,
- How is project progress measured - Anyone that tells me that the %complete calculation function in MS Project works is ignorant!! - I can prove to anyone who is interested that the algorithm is faulty, and
- How project team communications, stress and conflict is managed.
- Describe a time when you had to give bad news on a project to a customer. There are a lot more approaches to this than you would think, and answers can be insightful.
- What did you learn from your first job (like flipping burgers at McD's)? The idea here is to see if they can glean useful information out of simple situations, can they reflect and learn from any situation. I think this form of continuous learning is key for PMs.
- How good are you at MS Project (or whatever tool you use)? This is almost a trick question from my perspective. I believe that most of a PM's job is people, so if someone knows a piece of software forwards-and-backwards, they probably don't have the people skills required to do the job.
- Describe how you motivate and manage a matrixed team--where the people on your team do not work for you. Since this is often the mode, they must be able to do it.
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