Hey everyone.
I'm Max Dalton, and in this video I'm going to walk through 14 common project management
interview questions and answers.
Interviews for project manager positions can be especially hard because there are so many
different tools, everyone is using an project management methodology that's cobbled together
for their specific organization, and you don't understand the structure of the organization
(for example, matrix, functional, or something else).
In this video I'll pull from my experience in just under 100 project manager interviews
(as both the candidate and hiring manager), and walk you through 14 common project management
interview questions and answers so you'll be better prepared in your next interview.
Question 1) How do you deal with difficult stakeholders?
This question is really trying to dig into how you analyze stakeholders, and also how
you manage stakeholders and their expectations.
An ideal answer will talk about how you undergo stakeholder analysis, and as part of that
you work to understand the influence each stakeholder has over your project, and the
interest each stakeholder has in your project.
This will help you understand the power dynamics between the players in your project.
This is important because it will yield who has the power and the incentive to help you
get everyone on the same page and keep your project moving forward.
You should also have information around the specific nuances and needs associated with
your key stakeholders to ensure you're giving them what they need and when they need it
to keep them happy and keep them from becoming difficult stakeholders.
With all of that in mind, you can't keep everyone happy, and you'll still need to speak to how
you handle a stakeholder who, in spite your best efforts, is causing trouble.
A good first answer is to sit down with the difficult stakeholders in a 1-1 meeting and
work to understand their concerns and see if there's anything you can do, within reason,
to address them.
You'll want to stress that you keep an open mind.
However, if this doesn't work, your next stop should be a discussion with the project's
executive sponsor to explain the situation and seek help in reigning in the difficult
stakeholder.
Question 2) How do you know when your project schedule is slipping?
What do you do when it slips?
With this question, the interviewer is looking for you to speak to how you monitor your project
schedule, and when and how you communicate its status.
The first item you'll want to speak to is how you use earned value formulas to monitor
your project schedule.
This would include tracking the schedule variance and schedule performance index (among other
metrics) to understand if the project work is ahead of, on, or behind schedule.
From there, you'll want to speak to how you communicate this information out to project
stakeholders and team members, and how this information factors into determining your
overall project status.
For example, maybe you have a threshold of plus or minus .25 from 1, where if the schedule
performance index falls anywhere outside of that threshold the status is automatically
placed into a yellow state because of the schedule risk.
Question 3) What is the critical path?
Even if Microsoft Project and other project management tools will automatically calculate
the critical path for you, it's still important to be able to speak to what it is.
In short, the critical path for a project is the task sequence with the longest duration.
There will be no float associated with any task on the critical path, and as a result
if any task on the critical path is delayed, the project completion date will need to be
moved out.
It's also important to remember that a project can have multiple critical paths.
Question 4) What's your experience with remote teams?
More and more frequently organizations are forming remote project teams.
Remote project teams are project teams where the members may either all work from home,
or work in different states, or even work in different countries.
Be honest if you've never worked on a remote project team; in most cases it shouldn't be
a dealbreaker.
If you have, speak to your experience and explain what you feel worked well and what
you would have done differently that could have made the remote team more successful.
For example, whenever I've been asked this question, I always bring up the challenge
of being in different time zones when you're working with people in other countries, and
how that makes it difficult to find a good time for everyone to have meetings to discuss
the project.
Question 5) How do you handle underperforming team members?
An interviewer who asks this question most likely wants to hear about how you identified
the underperforming team member, and how you addressed the situation.
For example, a good answer to this question would involve talking through your feedback
model, and how you escalate from a 1-1 conversation to having a conversation with the person's
manager if you're not that individual's immediate manager.
Question 6) How do you determine if a project is successful?
As an answer to this question you want to discuss how you work with the requestor in
the discovery phase of the project to think through and define the success criteria for
the project.
Ideally, these will be three to five quantifiable data points that can be looked at over defined
periods of time.
For example, you may have success criteria around seeing sales increase 5% six months
after the project completes, and 10% in the first year.
Question 7) What project management software do you use?
This is a broad-sweeping question where, more often then not, the interviewer just wants
to hear about what project management software you're familiar with.
Examples of project management software include JIRA, Microsoft Project, Quick Base, Trello,
Monday.com, Workfront, Excel and more.
Question 8) What project management methodologies have you worked with?
The broad categories are typically either waterfall or agile.
In a pure waterfall methodology all of the discovery and planning are done up front before
work on the project gets underway.
Alternatively, in an agile project management methodology, you plan and work on specific
items that are part of a larger work effort over a short period of time that are typically
called sprints.
While there are some places that strictly adhere to a specific methodology, most places
operate with a hybrid environment where they blend aspects of each methodology to create
something that works for that specific organization.
Question 9) How do you manage conflict?
A critical role of the project manager is to manage conflict on a project.
If the interview question comes up asking you how you manage conflict, you want to use
this as an opportunity to flex your knowledge around strategic ways to handle conflict.
This includes confronting problems, seeking compromises, smoothing the conflict, forcing
the conflict, and avoiding the conflict.
Even if you're a project manager who isn't familiar with these terms, these are all things
you've done over the course of your career to resolve conflicts, just logically organized
in a way that makes them easier to explain and speak to.
Question 10) How do you deal with difficult team members?
When an interviewer asks this question, they want to hear you walk through how you worked
to understand the issues and concerns the team member has, and what you did to address
them to the best of your ability within reason.
As the project manager, you'll want to walk through your thought process associated with
assessing whether the situation warrants escalation to the team member's immediate supervisor
(if that person isn't you), or if you want to try and replace that team member with someone
else.
You want to show that you're thinking through the impact to the team member, the team, and
ultimately the project.
Question 11) How do you monitor a project's budget?
This is another opportunity to talk through any earned value formulas you use to monitor
the budget for a specific project.
This could include the cost performance index, estimate at completion, and cost variance,
among other earned value formulas.
If you're a project manager who operates in more of an agile environment, a good tool
for monitoring the health of your budget is a burndown chart.
Question 12) How do you handle requests for changes to a project's scope?
Answering this question incorrectly could be the end of your interview.
You want to walk the interviewer through what you understand a change control process is,
how that process is communicated to project team members (hint, it should be part of the
project plan that gets signed off on by the key stakeholders), and how you handle pushback
against the change control process.
At a high level, your overview of a change control process should speak to how you gather
information about a change, how you assess and score the impact of that change to the
scope, cost, and schedule baselines for the project, the review and approval process for
the proposed change, and how approved changes are implemented.
Question 13) How do you identify and manage risk in a project?
When I ask this question to prospective project managers, the first thing I look for them
to speak to is their approach to identifying risks in a project.
It's always good if you can outline some of the common sources for risks in the industry
you're interviewing to work in.
From there, I look for candidates to discuss how they assess and score the risk (eg, high,
medium and low), how they identify a risk owner, and what they look for in a risk mitigation
plan.
Question 14) Tell us about one of the more difficult problems you've had to solve as
a project manager, and give us specifics about how you solved it.
Be careful if someone throws this question at you.
It's a favorite of Elon Musk, and I ask it to all of the project management and developer
candidates I interview.
What I'm looking for the candidate to demonstrate through their answer to this question is critical
thinking and problem solving.
I want them to show off their ability to think analytically and critically.
They should illustrate their ability to look at a problem from multiple angles, identify
different solution options, and speak to how and why they arrived at a specific solution
to that problem.
If someone wants to claim they solved a difficult problem but can't speak to the specifics of
it, that is a red flag.
What's the hardest question you've been asked in an interview for a project manager position?
Let us know in the comments below.
And click the video link on the right side of the screen to check out another video,
or click the logo on the left side of the screen to subscribe to this channel to see
more great videos like this one.