Project management interview questions & answers - Part III

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.

Project management interview questions & answers - Part I