Project Management Concepts Through Interview Questions for Project Managers - Part 1

The aim of this series of articles is to introduce project management concepts. Interview questions one may face for project Manager position are used as a vehicle to introduce these concepts. This is the first part of the series and introduces the preliminaries. The series is going to be in ten parts, and each article in the series will discuss five questions that you may get asked and explain the related questions. Concepts introduced should help you prepare for PMP certification that is often required for a Project Manager position.

The very first question could well be what would be the definition of a project? A project is not like the regular set of activities of an organization. For example a biscuit/cookie factory will have a set of activities defined that are required to produce a specific type of biscuit/cookie. These would be the manufacturing activities. Whereas, if it were decided to create a different kind of packaging for the product that will be taken up as a project activity. The set of activities defined to generate a new packaging will be a onetime project. However, when the packaging is created and approved, the set of activities added/existing activities modified, to create the packaging becomes part of the manufacturing process. In general, the set of activities/tasks that are taken up to create a specific result, product or a process could be defined as a project. By definition these are temporary, one-time activities unlike the everyday manufacturing activities.

If you were asked to provide some examples of a project, it could go as follows. The re-design of the cookie packaging is certainly a project. Another example would be the kind of activities that were scheduled for creating the new product, the Microsoft Surprise tablet. This is also an example of a project that may have related projects. This product project gave rise to a project for the design of the liquid magnesium deposition process for a lightweight yet very strong enclosure for the product. Designing and building a laptop with the latest and the greatest processor released by their manufacturer, creation of an airport for a city are some other examples.

What do you understand by project management? This is a question you would typically face early in the interview. When a project is launched its scope, budget allocations, and required quality levels of the outcome are defined. Necessary resource allocations are made. Risks associated are assessed. The project manager and the project team have to ensure the goals are met at the right quality levels and within the given time and budget. To do so, they need to depend on a range of knowledge and skills. Using the knowledge and the skills, to balance the often conflicting demands of projects, is project management.

The kind of activities required at the beginning of a project and when it closes will, intuitively, be different. Do projects have life-cycle phases? That is a question that is asked often in the opening set of questions. The answer is yes, of course. The kinds of activities required are quite different. The project needs to start with a planning phase that will define how the project will get done. Actually executing the plan and monitoring the progress needs to be part of the project execution phase. If progress should start drifting out of expected variations, corrective actions are required. This is part of the execution phase. Finally, there will be a set of distinct activities that take care of closing the project properly. Recording what has been learnt and modifying documents/ organization's processes accordingly is part of this phase. These documents as a whole are often referred to as an organization's process assets. These could be typically; the way estimates are done; forms to be used; specific data to be captured for a project history; etc.

Projects, Programs and Portfolios are terms often heard in context of project management. What are the differences between them? Program as mentioned beforehand, is more than one project related in some way. The design of the tablet is a program that contains at least two projects. One of them is the process development for the enclosure made of vaporized magnesium. The other project in the program would be design and development of the electronics for the system. A collection of projects taken up to achieve a set of related purposes is a portfolio. A typical fighter plane development would be a portfolio of projects that take care of the airframe, the jet engines, the armaments to go with it, etc.

Project Management Concepts Through Interview Questions for Project Managers - 4

The aim of this series of articles is to introduce project management concepts. Interview questions one may face for project Manager position, are used as a vehicle to introduce these concepts. This is the fourth part of the series and further concepts. The series is going to be in ten parts, and each article in the series will discuss five questions that you may get asked and explain the related questions. Concepts introduced should help you prepare for PMP certification that is often required for a Project Manager position.

Quite often, customers request projects. There is one document that details what the customer requires the project to achieve. What is the requirements' document, typically, known as? A statement of works or SOW is the name of the document. It contains details of the expected outcomes of the project. What product, services or result are explicitly stated in the document. Quality levels to be achieved are also included in the document. It is as detailed as possible as the SOW forms a part of the contract between the customer and the executing organization.

One of the biggest problems associated with scope management is to manage the scope creep. Change being a constant, minimizing the effect of changes in the scope is a major concern. The scope can obviously affect the scope. How does one manage scope for the least effect on the time and cost budget? Scope management starts with requirements gathering, followed by defining the scope. To ensure that the initial definition of what's to be done is accurate, the project scope needs to be broken down to as many details as possible. That ensures two things. One, the work required is defined completely and the corresponding execution time estimate is accurate. The detailed list of work is known as the work breakdown structure or the WBS. A dictionary (WBS dictionary) that may define further details is also associated with the WBS. A scope baseline is defined by the WBS and the associated WBS dictionary. Scope management also must include mechanisms to control scope creep. All the planning of a project is based on this scope baseline, and thus the plans can get messed up if the original scope does not remain well controlled.

How does the WBS affect time estimates of activities in a Project? Activities required for a project, and sub-activities required for each are defined in the WBS. The breakdown needs to go down to details such that, the activity is completely defined. No further simplification is called for. WBS dictionary contains additional details of each task. These details help arrive at effort estimate and their time estimates quite accurately. Dependencies between activities are also all spelt out in these documents.

Sometimes changes are inevitable. What one needs to watch out for, is that the changes do not cause uncontrolled consequences. How can change control be managed? Everything being interlinked, all the effects and changes necessary in project documents and plans should be updated systematically. An integrated change control process can ensure this systematic change on all the documents/plans. Document changes are made only when the change requests are approved by a review board with sufficient authority.

How does one define a milestone? Milestone is a marker on the project time schedule. This marks the point at which some clearly defined objective; a part of the expected results or services are achieved. Achievement of these milestones gives the project team a good feel of how much of the project, goals have been achieved.