Project management interview questions & answers

How would you handle non-productive developers or team-members?

1. Align big lofty goals with their personal goals. If not, incentivize them by helping them identify the personal goals(like learning a new programming language that will be used in this project that will help her/him get motivated)
2. Clearly define roles and responsibilities. Assign accountability to them.
3. Don't be overly strictly. Put some big rules in place but don't keep overemphasizing them. 
4. Include the team in decision making and planning process. 
5. Do retrospective meetings to ensure what has been accomplished and what not. 
6. Talk to them to understand if they need help.  

How will you get traction from a TPM of another team?

1. Communicate the goals to them and what impact they are going to make. Indicate KPIs or metrics that this goals could help achieve. 
2. Align their projects with yours and involve them into planning. 
3. Divide the projects into roadmap and sub-stories. Make them commit to the sub-stories and ask for timelines.
4. Offer help if they are not able to achieve those timelines. 
5. Glorify them when the projects are achieved within reasonable time limits. This will make them very likely to work with you again. 

What are important things of consider while running a cross-team program?

1. Helps if roles and responsibilities are defined. 
2. Communication is shared. And their are frequent updates. Frequent meetings of leaders, where they provide updates from their teams. 
3. Its best if they know the mission and goals one can achieve. Report frequently on KPIs and metrics. 
4. Encourage cross-functional training. 
5. Celebrating major milestones and congratulating the team on achieving the goals.

How do you earn trust of your team members.

1. Lead by example
2. Communicate openly
3. Don't place blame on any one person. Tackle the issue at hand without pointing fingers. 
4. Discuss trust issues. 
5. Be available to them to discuss project goals and communicate often. 
6. Develop team exercises. 
7. Be calm, open, and transparent where ever possible. 
8. Encourage mutual feedback. 
9. Allow flexibility in choosing projects, hours.
10. Be patient with new employees. 

How do you plan a project or program?

1. Under the project goals. 
1. Align them with company goals and mission. 
2. Define KPIs and metrics. 
3. Prioritize goals. 
2. Identify stakeholders and meet with them. Discuss project goals with them to see if they help achieve their goals. 
3. Create a product roadmap. 
4. Divide roadmap into deliverables. 
5. Assign deliverables to functional and dev teams. Create a project schedule of the deliverables. 
6. Identify issues or technology gaps and complete risk assessment. 
1. Think of alternatives to avoid or minimize risk. 
2. Think of MVPs in case project runs into delivery issues. 
7. Present the plan to stakeholders. 
8. Communicate the plan to the dev teams and keep things moving. 

What in your opinion are three constraints of a project or program?
Its called as Project management triple constraint. Those are:

1. Time
2. Cost
3. Scope
4. 4th: Meets the customers requirements. - Make it PM diamond.

Tell-tale signs that your project is going to fail:
Objectives:

1. Missing strategy. 
2. No clear goals.
3. Leadership priority issues. 
4. Too many projects at one time. 
5. Constant scope changes.
6. Last minute major changes.

Leaders:

1. Team doesn't trust higher level or management. 
2. Management or key people leaves in between the projects.

People:

1. Stakeholders are not interested. 
2. No knowledge sharing. 
3. Resource limits

How do you motivate your team of developers?

1. Provide them flexibility to choose the projects and times they could work on whenever possible. 
2. Involve them in planning and important decision making if possible. Don't ask them to do it because upper management is doing it. 
3. Help them understand what KPIs or metrics you are trying to achieve. And how it will help shape the company. 
4. Career growth: Help them with career growth if possible. Align the career goals to the projects that are pending.
5. Innovation: Allow them to utilize latest tools and technologies. If they are going to conferences to learn new things let them go. Request a demo to see you are interested what they have been learning. See if you can put sometime in project planning to let them experiment with new technologies. 
6. Create structured trainings in the organizations. Let me take online trainings and reimburse it when needed. 
7. Provide recognition of good work.
8. Good infrastructure to let them work. 
9. Empower them to make the decisions where ever possible. Don't wait on you for each and everything. 

How have you contributed to the success of the project? 
By:

1. Understanding end goals.
2. Understanding my role and each team's roles.
3. Identifying Interdependencies and stating them early on. 
4. Cross functional and periodic communication via emails, standups, meetings. 
5. Setting up milestones and periodic checking enabling team to collaborate well.   
6. Accepting and managing problems.
7. Recognizing and rewarding the teams. 

How would you increase efficiency of your development team? 
By:

1. Document Coding and dev standards.
2. Implement CI integration. 
3. Release often if possible.
4. Schedule demos.
5. Follow test driven development. 
6. Creating detailed tasks. 
7. Review backlog
8. Resolve blockers. 
9. Have short meetings.
10. Support initiative 
11. Rely and trust your team's expertise, where ever possible. 

If you come about an early delay in one of your milestones what would you do?

1. Catch them early by monitoring the progress of the project and staying in touch with leads through out the project. 
2. Notify stakeholders: Update them on delay and revised schedules. 
3. Call for a meeting: Dev, technical teams, vendors, stakeholders, customers and update them on the delay. 
4. Gather the right resources: Re-allocate the resources. 
5. Reschedule: Check if some activities that were planned sequentially can be done parallely.
6. Re-prioritize: List out all the activities that are not yet done. Move the important ones to the top of the list. 
7. Document the updated plan and send it out to everyone.  

How to decide between traditional project management v/s Agile methologies?
Use traditional when:

1. Long and detailed planning is required. 
2. Processes is linear and all the tasks are scheduled sequentially. 
3. Requires a formal CM process. 
4. Prioritization is fixed.
5. Customer feedback can be taken at the end and incorporated into future releases. Customer involvement is low. 
6. Organization is very centralized. 
7. ROI is achieved at product release.
8. Ex: Hardware or non-customer facing projects like infrastructure or technology changes. 

Use Agile when: 

1. Process and decision making is iterative.
2. Need customer feedback right away and can be incorporate right away.
3. Organization is de-centralized. 
4. Prioritization changes based on business requirements and customer feedback. 
5. Small amount of work is picked up to be done. Rest can be updated and prioritized based on inputs. 
6. Customer involvement is high.
7. ROI is achieved often and is iterative. It determines what the future releases. 

What are the various states of the project? - RYG. What do they stand for? How to move the project from R to G?
Green: Project is within budget, timeline, and expectation.
Yellow: Project might fallout of budget, timeline or expectation and is it risk. Requires special attention from team involved. If needed from higher ups.
Red: Some aspect of the project has fallen behind or encountered major setback or is over budget
How to move R to G: Have a plan on paper, get a buy in, and get it approved. Once everyone agrees to the new set of parameters then move it to G from R.
Some teams move G to Y or R to get feedback from upper management so that they can get their expertise involved to get it done.