Program / Project Manager Interview Questions with answers .. Set 3 by idealprojectmanagement.com

Think Big - Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers.

• Tell me about a time you took a calculated risk in order to achieve a professional goal. What were the tradeoffs? What was the outcome?

  • Moving to a pharmaceutical company after doing years of consulting for Big 4. The motivation was grounded on contributing to society at basic level through serving the healthcare industry. The tradeoff was missing out of some of the opportunities/transformational project while consulting. Additionally, healthcare industry was known to move slower compared to fast paced consulting lifestyle. The outcome was quite satisfying as job satisfaction was much higher through my actions helping the patients directly at the ground level.

• Tell me about a time you took a big risk and it failed. What did you learn? What would you do differently?

  • While executing a major transformational project, one of the key integration provided by the software vendor failed at the time of go-live that posed shutting the operations down within the warehouse. While negotiating the contract, my recommendation of incorporating clauses that covers these mishaps was not implemented due to timing constraints. Since the incident happened during 1st of 4 planned releases, I worked with the vendor mgmt department to amend the contract to hold our vendors accountable for the services. This resulted in refreshed support model from the vendor that helped avoid similar situations for the remaining 3 releases.

• Tell me about a time you went way beyond the scope of the project and delivered.

  • Being a strong believer in fixing the root causes, rather than putting in a band-aid solution, I pay close attention to the scope my project team signs up for. The scope creep and padding estimates are something I intend to avoid while managing the projects. However, there are situations where a project Manager have to be flexible. One such project was XYZ at ABC company where our business partners wanted to rollout the functionality not just for one state, but for entire US region. My immediate action was to update the Steerco, and secured their alignment to assess the impact on 3 pillars of the project: Scope, time and cost. Upon assessment, the findings were presented to the Leadership and project baselines were revised.

• Tell me about your proudest professional achievement.

  • Project XYZ: That I was able to make difference to the services procured by the customers who happened to be the patients across North America.

Additional sample questions to review:

• Give me an example of a radical approach to a problem you proposed. What was the problem and why did you feel it required a completely different way of thinking about it? Was your approach successful?

• How do you drive adoption for your vision/ideas? How do you know how well your idea or vision has been adopted by other teams or partners? Give a specific example highlighting one of your ideas.

• Tell me about time you were working on an initiative or goal and saw an opportunity to do something much bigger than the initial focus.

• Tell me about a time you looked at a key process that was working well and questioned whether it was still the right one. What assumptions were you questioning and why? Did you end up making a change to the process?