Project Manager Interview Guide (II)

Ask the Interviewer:
Even if you get this position through the interview, you still need information to evaluate it. This is a good opportunity for you. This is especially critical if it is the first task of the project manager. You need to understand your work environment. Therefore, you can ask the following questions:
1. What is company priority?
2. Who is the sponsor of this project?
3. What is the development principle system used by the company?
4. What is the project deadline?
5. Is there a way to measure project success?
6. How will your new manager keep the project informed?
7. What is your new manager's management philosophy and style?
8. What are the skill levels of people on the project?
9. Have you fully defined the scope of managed projects?
10. Have you selected the technical environment?
The following are common questions (expected answers) during typical project management interviews ):
The answer to many questions is subjective. The interviewer wants to know if your opinions are consistent with those of them and the company. The problem is as follows:
1. project management software and tools knowledge,
2. technical preparation of the project plan,
3. Personnel management skills
4. Communication Skills
5. principles and system knowledge (standard development lifecycle and project management ).

Knowledge of software and tools in project management
Question 1: What is the difference between the construction period and the workload?
Answer 1: the duration is the number of days on the business/Calendar, regardless of the number of people and workload. The workload is the work of persons irrelevant to the calendar days. For example:
One day's workload is two days for a person who spends 50% of his time on the website. If two people work full-time, the duration is one day, and the workload is two working days.
Question 2: How and why should dependencies be considered when preparing a project plan?
Answer 2: depending on the software package used, dependencies can be expressed by associating the task and its subsequent task identifiers. Dependencies describe the requirements for association and parallel operation between tasks. Dependency can be that a task must be completed before another task can start. For example, the logical model must be completed before the physical model. However, the test does not start after all the programming work is completed, if the unfinished program has no effect on the linear test.
By adding dependencies to a project plan, you can find the key path of the project and determine its impact on the project duration.
Question 3: How do you combine people's work steps with plans?
Answer 3: based on the specific tools used by the organization, you can split resources into smaller resources/units, or split tasks into smaller tasks.
Question 4: How do you combine training, holidays, and individual education schedules?
Answer 4: Each product has a company/global calendar indicating the number of days it does not work. Each product also has a personal resource calendar indicating the time when an individual is not working. If projects require education and training, they should be written as tasks in the Project Plan.
Question 5: How do you arrange tasks that run through the entire project, such as meetings in a similar status, but require a very short amount of time and work?
Answer 5: the duration of the project will be as long as the whole project time, with a small percentage of work. The percentage of time spent by each person assigned to a task as a percentage of his/her time is very low.
Question 6: What is the significance of the live report on the plan and the comparison between the live report and the initial expectation?
Answer 6: according to the specific tools used by the Organization, each tool inputs independent element/Domain Information in the live report. Reports can also be classified to indicate changes in key paths or adjustments to timelines to team members and other relevant groups. These reports are valuable to the assessed work and as inputs to the next project or stage of the plan. Another valuable purpose of comparing estimation with the live report is to record the impact of Scope change on the project.

Skills in project planning
Question 7: Why do you plan a project?
Answer 7: A project plan is a road map to a successful system. It provides a means to notify everyone of what they want to do and when to complete it. It helps the project manager to enable management, business users, and support groups to understand the project status and adjust special resources. A one-by-one "list" helps quickly assess the impact of any changes. When the live report is linked with the plan, the Project Plan provides useful information for future project task division and estimation.
Question 8: How do you plan the project?
Answer 8: process arrangement is an art. Based on known facts about business objectives, general company standards, and past experiences that can be used. You can start by clearly defining the range and target. Make the risks and constraints of the project into a document. Poor estimation is due to lack of understanding of business knowledge and project scope. You can start with project task decomposition, for example, dividing stages first, then defining activities in each stage, and then defining tasks in each activity. Identifies and documented milestones and deliverable products. A project plan is a lifecycle file that is constantly refined when information becomes available. It is beneficial for the Project Manager, Development Team, support team, management, and business users to record the changes in progress.
Question 9: How do you plan the project?
Answer 9: enter a specific task under an appropriate activity or stage or other general standard description. Associate appropriate deliverables and milestones with specific tasks. Connect all associated tasks. Add the resource role or resource name to each task. Use the measurement results to determine the task workload and use more time for requirement collection, design, and testing. Consider all known holidays, training, vacation or other resource shutdown times. The draft plan will be reviewed with support groups, management and business users as complementary inputs and final approvals.
Question 10: How to Determine personnel requirements? Answer 10: plan development without considering resource restrictions. Add roles such as data model makers, business analysts, and users next to a task. Add complementary resources that can overlap tasks. In the plan, we should consider the loss of one or more resources by the development team, including the support team and user representatives. We should increase the margin by 15% for each task. To make the composition of the project team easy to understand, there must be a description of the technical level necessary for the role.
Question 11: what is the value of adding measurement standards to the project?
Answer 11: if used properly, measurement standards are a valuable tool. They provide methods to determine the complexity and workload of development systems. The measurement results provide information input resources for developing a project plan and are valuable historical information for determining the development direction. Software measurement standards will help develop better software. However, it is best to have three years of historical data.
Question 12: How do you plan to use new technologies?
Answer 12: increase the workload while increasing the number of training tasks, and reduce the number of work units. Add additional prototypes and checkpoints (milestones) to evaluate the impact of new technologies in development ).

Personnel management skills
Question 13: What is the first thing you do as a project manager?
Answer 13: in addition to paying attention to the company's development direction and discovering its own development path, you should establish the things (business, company, project, team, and individual) that the project manager pays attention to in mind, changes in technology and methodology. Therefore, they should hold meetings with department managers to prioritize user and staff meetings and receive status reports and comments from all Members. It is important to be able to handle business, project, and personal matters as soon as possible.
Question 14: How do you start to complete the company's projects when your staff drops by 30%?
Answer 14: first, determine and prioritize projects and which projects must be completed in the next 18 months. Associate the absolute minimum total number with each project. Describe the impact on the schedule to managers and users. Because neither of the two may be willing to accept changes in the schedule, you may be given some exceptions.
It is better to lose a consultant than to remove an employee. The consultant for each project may be replaced by an employee. Adhere to the learning curve theory and gradually reduce the number of consultants. You can reduce the workload of some consultants from one week to two or three days in one week to cope with staff reductions.
If the company has a list of sub-laws for early retirement, find qualified and applicable employees. Keep in mind that you may lose valuable knowledge if you lose your old qualifications. Try to combine a fast-retired person and a novice.
Determine the importance of the remaining employees and their importance in each project on the premise of meeting the business objectives. Make the ratio of beginner to experienced personnel appropriate. Both of them are the wealth to ensure the continuous success of projects and companies.
Question 15: Your team is mainly composed of new players, and the progress has lagged behind. What will you do?
Answer 15: Remember that a project is rarely canceled because it is not completed within the deadline. The project is canceled, mainly for example, the lack of funds, user support or service objectives that cannot be met.
Therefore, the first thing to do is training, whether indoors or outdoors, in the classroom or through video tapes. Another additional method is to enable senior employees or senior consultants to act as teachers.
Hold personal assessment and coaching meetings. Help each employee accurately evaluate their respective advantages and disadvantages. Meanwhile, clarify the task and clarify all standards or guidelines that must be observed. Provide each employee with a template obtained from a successful project as a guide and allow them to make full use of their talents. Work with them if needed. Provide rapid feedback on any issues or completed tasks.
For larger tasks, look at their plans to help determine whether they understand the scope and objectives of the task and whether they can complete the task. Listen to the opinions of employees. Maybe they will have the right way to complete the task. However, it is also necessary to prevent employees from falling into the predicament of setbacks and morale.
Question 16: How will you get along with employees in the same position as your competitors?
Answer 16: This is a frequent unpleasant situation. Employees always think that they are competent for a job and the management is not aware of this. Therefore, perform the following investigation:
Discover employee management capabilities
Read evaluation and status report
When an employee becomes uncooperative, he tries to find some workarounds and makes some personal conversations about the situation, including:
Identify the situation
Analyze with the employee what qualifications he/she has to improve him/her
Emphasize the necessity of cooperation in the initial stage and how the management attaches great importance to cooperation.
Question 17: how much freedom will you give your staff in terms of decision-making and work style?
Answer 17: The size of freedom depends on everyone's skills and professionalism. A good manager is "result-oriented" and can create an environment for the team to communicate extensively. In any case, each employee submits weekly status reports related to the project and business objectives and the manager is responsible for review. This is conducive to strengthening the Organization and enabling each employee to devote themselves to the work they should do.
Question 18: how do I treat retired employees?
Answer 18: retired employees can provide a lot of information. A person must think twice before turning out all business knowledge and network relationships. Therefore, we need to take advantage of these capabilities: they can be new teachers in some special skills. Clarify the main work interests. To enable projects to fully utilize these skills, they can use the necessary support they obtain from informal channels (without formal and bureaucratic approaches)
Question 19: What do you do for an employee who is always late?
Answer 19: A good manager Evaluates an employee based on the result and time spent. However, you also need to know the impact of being late on your company and team. When a person is late, people will feel that the leader is private and will affect the team's morale. This person may be able to complete his tasks on schedule, but may affect others' progress. Professional features include reliability. If others' work progress depends on their work progress, their progress is very important to the entire team.
First, judge the mode of these employees. In other words, this is often the case occasionally. Secondly, clarify the company's attendance policies and determine latencies and related handling methods. Check whether the employee's work is in line with the progress and the response of the person working with him to his late arrival.
Finally, you must have an objective conversation with them.
The topics of the conversation include:
Company Rules and Regulations
Impact on teams
Impact on personal rating
Time progress emphasized
Understanding reached
Question 20: How do you boost morale when the cost is reduced?
Answer 20: money is not the only incentive. People need to know if they have made positive contributions to the project. Therefore, we need to emphasize our pride and hold business meetings, so that users can talk about their good impressions on the project team. At the same time, let users give a summary of their functions and services. Training is an incentive. As a result, status meetings can serve as an informal training course. Occasionally hold internal seminars on new technologies. If the training course costs too much, you can rent technical videotape. Many technical magazines are free of charge. It must be remembered that ignoring training will bring down the team spirit. This will affect the quality and quantity of products.
Question 21: How do you hire someone?
Answer 21: first, describe the skills required for a job. If you do not understand your current needs, it is difficult to hire the right people. Next, we need to understand the personality of team members. List the skills or work styles that a team lacks. Discuss all these situations with the human resources department, including moving existing employees. When a candidate arrives, he will be interviewed for his current job and will be asked if he has the skills required for the new job.
Question 22: how do you resolve personal conflicts in the team?
Answer 22: identify different personalities. Express the value of each style to employees. An objective attitude should be taken when both parties discuss the cause of the appeal or conflict.
Question 23: How will you monitor/manage consultants?
Answer 23: The consultant is also a person and needs to be respected. They also need clear goals and tasks. Adhere to the work weekly report and associate the work time with the work completion status.
Question 24: how do you manage foreign aid?
Answer 24: The method is the same as that of the management consultant. However, they may have a manager responsible for outsourcing cooperation. First, organize daily meetings with the manager. Maintain weekly work reports and copies of deliverables.
Question 25: How will you work with the same employee who seems to be unable to finish the work on time?
Answer 25: The problem cannot be solved until the cause is found. The cause is not necessarily the ability to analyze or solve the problem. It may be a management issue.
The employee may not receive proper training and his/her work may be out of his/her capacity. Another possibility is that this person has too many things to do and these things are the most important or he does not know the delivery date.
If not, observe and find out the cause. For example, when everyone encounters a problem, they will find this person. This person's work is often interrupted countless times.

Communication skills
Question 26: How do you enable users to participate in and understand each stage of the project?
Answer 26: The prototype that runs through the entire project is a method that can be affirmed by users. Allows users to research tangible and intangible benefits for cost-benefit analysis. Develop test data with users, test outline and acceptance criteria. E-mail milestone status report and updated/modified project plan. Check the deliverables at the same time as the project conducts a phased inspection.
Question 27: How will you discover and solve internal and external problems?
Answer 27: Obtain the truth from all possible resources and record it objectively. Then, with the participation of relevant parties, try to solve the problem on your own. If this method is invalid, the problem is raised according to the Organization's management structure and the possible solutions are referenced.
Question 28: How do you get consistent support from suppliers?
Answer 28: although the suppliers are outside the scope of management, they can also be included if they:
Be respected
Understand business objectives
Pre-purchase
Using supply as input to the plan will affect them
Participate in Design
Therefore, supplier management should be considered in the early stages of the project. Make sure they understand the business goals and benefits of their work.
Question 29: How can we solve the "can we break some rules" phenomenon?
Answer 29: simply using a technology cannot persuade users or leaders. Anyone may resist changes that will change the status quo. However, if you associate technology with commercial profits, users will support your suggestions.
Question 30: How do you deal with different business users if:
A) Reject the confirmation request
B) I often change my mind.
C) refuse to spend time
D) stick to the unrealistic deadline
Answer 30: No matter how difficult the customer is to cope with, remember that we have a job because of them. They are customers. They must be highly professional and fully respectful.
Because they cannot understand our work, as we cannot fully understand them, communication becomes more complex. Therefore, we need to plan and explain what is included in it. Users need to feel that they are not wasting time, are achieving results, and their intentions are well understood. Prototyping is a useful tool. It provides a flexible picture that users can understand.
In addition, understanding of the work style is also important. Rejecting or constantly changing ideas may result from a lack of understanding or worry about the future.
Users often don't want to spend time talking with IT staff and think it is a waste of time, because it staff pays too much attention to their own tasks. Check the history of past products delivered. If users come multiple times but do not see valuable output, they will refuse to spend more time. In this case, you should make projects in the business field that you are good at in order to gain the respect of users.
Hold a one-hour demand discussion meeting to discuss special issues. At the end of the meeting, users should be informed of what to do next (and consensus should be reached ). Users' Opinions are recorded in the "meeting minutes. These will make users feel their opinions have been listened to and allow them to change their mistakes.
A project is often canceled because it does not meet users' Business Requirements economically and reasonably. If you maintain effective communication with users throughout the project, they will see that their requirements are gradually met. Projects are rarely canceled due to delays. Change the scope. Adding additional tasks on the original deadline will generate an unrealistic deadline.
Question 31: In a non-programming environment, I think that you are not working. How do you do your work?
Answer 31: If users think they understand their business goals, they want to start programming earlier. Create Requirement documents in a form that they can understand, provide an open way of communication, and let them know what you know and what you are doing. Through the project plan, the status report and the prototype can also indicate the progress of the project. Allows users to participate in the project by allowing users to review requirements, prototypes, and status reports.

Methodology knowledge
Question 32: What is the lifecycle and its role?
Answer 32: a development or maintenance life cycle describes the initial, intermediate, and complete processes of a specific project. A lifecycle includes all the steps, tasks, and/or activities to accomplish a specific target. Each activity may have a specific method. For example, you may follow the James Martins modeling method to create a data model. Object Modeling may use the Ivan jacson method. The life cycle uses all methods to accomplish business goals.
Question 33: Describe the phases, activities, and deliverables that should be included in your project plan.
Answer 33: The project plan should include the following phases (not in waterfall/linear order ):
Project management:
Typical activities: many people forget to join project plans such as development and maintenance, status meetings and reports, and evaluation data collection and reporting, create demo materials and present them to superiors and users. For example, internal project management activities that take time.
Typical delivery: Project Plan, status report, and evaluation report (for example, how many functional points are there)
Requirement Analysis:
Typical activities: scope definition, initial cost and profit analysis, and suggestions.
Typical delivery: scope document, physical and logical analysis, physical relationship diagram, cost profit analysis, commercial rule statement, task definition and summary description.
Design:
Typical activities: Establish development and test environments, create logical models, design technical systems, and execute plans.
Typical delivery: Logical Data Model, event model, object model, network model, physical design, Specification Description suitable for the development environment, modified specification, test plan, and flowchart.
Development:
Typical activities: coding, unit testing, and user documentation.
Typical delivery: Test manuals, process manuals, and procedures.
Test:
Typical activities: software and hardware testing, linear testing, system testing, integration testing, regression testing, and parallel testing.
Typical delivery: test results, Problem Reports, and tracking records.
Implementation and support:
Typical activities: first-stage results packaging and training.
Typical delivery: problem report process.
Check:
Typical activities: Check the target cost, development work, visible/invisible benefits three to six months after delivery.
Typical delivery: Implementation summary report.
Question 34: Which stage should the prototype be created in the project lifecycle?
Answer 34: throughout the project. See for reality. It is a good tool for verifying features, business rules, user requirement data, and testing. It is worth noting that prototype will not become a shoddy product. The prototype must be well maintained. The prototype should display the navigation relationships between windows and windows when the process and data are incomplete.
Question 35: What is the difference between Client/Server-based development and mainframe-based development in the project lifecycle?
Answer 35: projects developed based on clients and servers require additional tasks to prepare plans for each part. Check for events, data, and network locations must be included in each part of the plan. The distribution of servers and clients must be determined based on user requirements. In the server/client environment, the combination and method of the Appearance Modeling Technology and the prototype of the graphic interface should be used.
Question 36: how to manage and ensure quality in a maintenance project?
Answer 36: maintenance itself has negative significance. Many companies think that the maintenance work is not good, the second place. And constantly modify existing applications. Maintenance also has its lifecycle. Therefore, a plan should be established for the control and quality of maintenance activities. The new development plan includes the delivery of products and the time allocated for each task. The project plan should take into account the demand changes. In this way, the project manager and the user can see the impact of the change on the project progress.
Maintenance Phase/activities:
Determine the change (whether it will cause product problems, whether new features are added, or changes to the technical platform)
Officially record changes,
Confirm the change and preliminarily estimate the size of the change,
Sort existing changes by priority,
Change Analysis,
Program changes,
Perform system/regression tests on the impact of changes and changes on the system,
The user confirms the change,
Product submission,
Production.
Question 37: What is the difference between object-oriented development and traditional development methods in management technology?
Answer 37: there are few object-oriented project teams and there is no need for too many creative team members. It is important to have technical and personal roles. Each member must assume different roles at different stages of the project. Therefore, each member must understand their own advantages and disadvantages. Roles for one or more people are:
Designer (overall system structure)
Abstract engineer (class and class family)
Application Engineer (messages between finished and assembled classes and classes)
Due to the traditional development method, individual roles cannot be exchanged. Software development is the result of personal efforts. Even a team composed of the best and smartest people, if they cannot work for a common goal, the simplest project cannot be completed successfully.
Question 38: How do you allocate time between employee relations, project management, and text work?
Answer 38: people are the most valuable wealth, so it takes the most time. However, the project manager must focus on the order of things:
Business goals,
Company goals,
Project,
Team,
Individual,
Changes in technologies and methods
Question 39: What is PM-CMM?
Answer 39: Personnel Management Capability Maturity Model. Both PM-CMM and CMM are conceptual models developed by the Institute of software engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. PM provides an organizational method for human resource management. The five layers are:
Casual: there is no consistency in personnel management,
Repeatable: the Organization has some policies and guidelines on personnel management,
Clear: combining personnel management with business characteristics,
Measurable: Target quantification can be performed on personnel management,
Optimization: Organized and committed to continuously improving personnel management.
Summary
A successful team is a high morale team composed of members with different skills, talents, work style and knowledge. The project manager is responsible for forming and motivating these people into a team. This article reviews general concepts, terms, and frequently asked questions during interviews to prepare for the interview. You can sort out the answers based on your knowledge and experience on how to become a good project manager. Whatever the answer, try to impress the organization you apply. We should face it with a positive attitude. Focus on personnel management and a sound technical background. Should have the knowledge, confidence, listening and decision-making ability.