Project Management Interview Questions

#What is the difference between Project, Program, and Portfolio?

#Elaborate on the Project Management Life Cycle process?

The Project Management Life Cycle is a series of various activities/tasks that are crucial for accomplishing project objectives or targets. This helps in structuring the efforts and simplifying them into a series of logical and manageable steps. The Project Management Life Cycle consists of four simple phases which are listed below:

• Initiation: It’s the first and most vital step in the life-cycle of your project where the initial scope of the project gets defined and resources are committed. This process group ensures the success of your project.
• Planning: In this process group, an appropriate level of detail is jotted for the project to plan time, cost and resources. It estimates the work needed and manage risk effectively.
• Executing: This process group consists of the processes which are used to complete the work defined in the project management plan. It’s about achieving the project’s objectives. It also involves tracking, reviewing and regulating the performance of the project. Also, you need to identify potential problems quickly and take corrective actions.
• Closure: This process group is an important part of project management, performed to finalize all project activities to complete the project. This means finishing all activities across all the process groups, disbanding the project team and signing off the project with the customer using the project closure report.

#What are the most important skills that a Project Manager should possess?

Most important skills that a Project manager must possess are:

• Communication
• Leadership
• Team Management
• Negotiation Power
• Personal Organization
• Risk Management

#What is the process of calculating the three-point estimating method?

There are two ways in which you can calculate the three-point estimation:

Triangular Distribution:

E = (P+M+O)/3
Copy

Beta or PERT Distribution:

E=(P+4M+O)/6
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Where P = pessimist, O = Optimist, M = most likely.

#What is the Pareto principle analysis?

Pareto Analysis is a statistical technique in decision-making. It is basically used for the selection of a limited number of tasks which can bring a significant overall effect. This principle follows the Pareto Principle (also known as the 80/20 rule) and states that 80% of the results come from 20% of the actions. It helps in prioritizing the work especially in large projects with a number of small tasks

#What are the management styles?

• Autocratic
  • Variations
    • Authoritative
    • Persuasive
    • Paternalistic
• Democratic
  • Variations
    • Consultative
    • Participative
    • Collaborative
• Laissez-Faire
  • Variations
    • Delegative

#What is RAID in Project Management?

RAID in project management stands for Risk, Assumptions, Issue, and Dependencies. These are very important items that a project manager must have knowledge about.

Risks are the potential problems that can have either a positive or negative impact on the project resulting in a deviation of the final result from the original plan. Actions are the task that you perform throughout the project. Issues are the hurdles that you might face in the course of the project which must be successfully resolved or it might derail the project or cause the project to fail. Decisions are your choice of actions/tasks in the project.

#When you consider that your project is off track and what will be your steps to ensure that it finishes within the given timeline?

To detect whether your project is on track or falling behind the agreed timeline, you must check the below pointers:

• Budget is under control or not
• Is it consuming too much time
• Does the project scope keeps changing
• Original goals are still present or not
• If the answers to these pointers are true then, your project is definitely off the track and you must take immediate action to bring it back on track.

Few steps that you might take are:

• Discover the root cause
• Put in more time and efforts to catch up
• Try to follow the original goal or vision
• Re-adjust resource management (resource, finance, human etc.)
• Keep open communication with client and stakeholders

#How will you manage the team members who are not working to their full potential?

To bring the best out of your team members, you must:

Try to avoid any type of emotional confrontation with the team and stakeholders Encourage them to think and act in their own ways Help your team members in developing their decision-making abilities Develop their performance tolerance threshold Strengthen the potential of weak employees by surrounding them with those even stronger Understand what motivates your employees Show your employees where they fit in the company mission and vision Arrange a proper follow-up process Reward and appreciate their improvement to encourage them more Be ready to let them go if there is no scope of improvement

#Explain the triple constraint triangle in project management.

Triple Constraint Triangle is a combination of three key components which acts as the most significant restrictions on any project. Following are the three constraints in this model:

• Time
• Cost
• Scope Each of the constraints forms the vertices of the triangle with quality as the central factor.