hello welcome back to my YouTube channel my name is Helena and in this video I'm going to go over the 108 most commonly asked uh interview questions for project managers so if you study all of these questions I think you'll be in Top Notch shape for your interviews as we're going through some of these questions a lot of them are going to be a situational tell me about a time when blah blah blah so I really want you to pause the video and think about real experiences that you've had when you're actually managing projects and encountering some of these situations and if you never encounter some of these situations before think about what you would do if hypothetically you have encountered these um situations and if you want a full PDF of all of these interview questions simply click on the link in the description below and you can download a PDF with all of these um these practice interview questions and now without further Ado let's jump in and as I'm going through some these questions I'm going to give you some tips and tricks on how to answer them too so let's dive in now all right now let's dive into the 108 most commonly asked project manager interview questions now this is in no particular order so question number one is not more important than question number two for example so I'm going to read each question out to you for each question I'm going to try to give you some tips and tricks on how you can approach the question as well now let's dive in question number one how do you deal with team members who are not productive for this question you may want to say something like you know you want to talk to that team member to find out what the problem is and what you can do to support that team member if the if the problem's still not fixed then you may need to up escalate that to upper management question number two how are team members kept up to date on the Project's progress so for this question you may want to mention any project management tools you have used whether that's jira or some sort of kanban board and how you have um created that and kept that up to date and given access to all the team members so that they all know what's going on in the project you could also mention how you hosted daily scrum as well question number three what type of feedback does the executive management provide so you can talk about anytime you have demoed your working product to the executive management team and what kind of feedback they have given you um or whenever you have finished the project and presented that to the project sponsor and what kind of feedback they have given you and how you dealt with that feedback especially you know negative feedback right question number four there are many moving Parts in every project to ensure everyone is on the same page how do you track progress and communicate status to your team again here you can mention any project management tool that you're using and what kind of communication structures you have in place whether that is the daily scrum that you do to make sure everyone knows what everyone else is working on any kanban boards that you're doing any Sprint boards that you have created or Excel spreadsheets with Gantt charts so any kind of project management tool you've built in the past would be sufficient to answer this question question number five how do you measure the progress of changes made to your project so with this question you want to mention something like the change log that you have on your project which would store the list of changes that have been approved to be implemented on your project and on the change log maybe you have different columns on the progress of those changes whether it's still to do whether it's in progress how much of the change has been completed and all of the changes that have been made right question number six how often should you revise your project plan what are the signs that it's time to update the project roadmap is there a document outlining the revision frequency for everyone on the team to reference so with this question um you probably want to look at your project roadmap or project plan about once every quarter and just to see that the project plan is still in alignment with the overall organization strategy right so that you're still on track to helping the organization reach the organization goals and that the features that you're creating is still beneficial to the customers given you know the new information new discoveries you have made about your customers and if it's not then you know you have may want to remove some features and add in new features prioritize different things Etc and you never throw away old versions of your project plan you just simply create a new version that people can now reference question number seven what steps may you take to ensure that you and the rest of your project team members have the required technical abilities to complete it well in order to ensure that your team members have the required technical capabilities you have to first find out what you're building right and what skills are required to build the specific product um in question and from there you can see if your team members have the capabilities and if not then you need to hire to ensure that you have all the capabilities in order to complete the project question number eight how do you give tasks to your team members so with this question you first need to figure out if you're running a agile project or a waterfall project so in a waterfall project you'll grow as a project manager is to be more directive so you are assigning tasks to different team members and you do so based on their role based on their skill set based on kind of your history with them and what you know their strengths and weaknesses are but if you're running um a project using agile methodology such as scrum then you want your team to self-manage right so there is the concept of servant leadership you're just removing the obstacles and letting different team members um shine and for the team members to figure out who is best to do what task so with this question you first need to figure out what methodol what kind of project methodology is being used and then you'll be better able to know what your role in terms of assigning tasks to the team members would be question number nine what is the primary document that should be consulted to learn more about your project the tasks you accomplished and your schedules and Milestones this would be your project management plan question 10 what is the best way to motivate team members who are feeling burnt out or bored well to answer this question you first need to know why this team member is feeling burnt out or bored right if the work is not interesting to them maybe you're giving them some other tasks that are more interesting to them and that will give them more room to grow if they're feeling burnt out because they have way too much to do maybe you want to extend out the schedule so that the team member is not working on death margin they're always getting burnt out right so to properly answer this question you would have to ask some follow-up questions to figure out why these team members are feeling burnt out and bored first question 11 what is the best approach to deal with team members who come to you with their personal difficulties now with this question it's not best to say well it's just personal difficulties it's not work so it's none of my business you have to remember that the people you're working with are human beings too and you have to relate to them on a personal level if you want them to give you their best performance at work right so again with this question you have to figure out what that personal difficulty is um and then you can better assist that team member perhaps you know it's taking a few days off of work or perhaps it's getting them some counseling so you had to figure out what that particular difficulty is and then um do your best to help that team member from there question number 12 what are your long-term career aspirations in what way would this job help you achieve those goals well this one's pretty straightforward question number 13 how do the Departments within your company communicate and collaborate with each other so here you have to realize that your project doesn't happen in a vacuum it happens within the organization it needs to talk to HR it needs to talk to finance it needs to talk to it Etc so you just have to explain how you have worked with the external environment of your project like the other departments within your project and how that has helped you collaborate and help you reach your project goals question number 14 tell me how you would react to a scenario in which there were several ways to complete the same activity and people had strong feelings on each side so this is a scenario where there was this the you can reach the same goal but there are two or three different ways to reach that goal and part of your team wants to go route a part of your team wants to go route B and in this scenario you as a project manager or the scrum Master you don't just want to side with one team automatically you want to listen to both teams and also for both teams to listen to each other and also play The Devil's Advocate to both Solutions so you want to ask hard questions and for you know people who like solution a to really justify their answer and for people who like solution B to also really justify their answer and as you ask more and more of these tough questions I think flaws in one of the solutions would naturally appear and the better route to take would naturally occur as a result of these discussions so the important thing here is you're not just forcing a solution um to the team members but you're discussing it you're talking it out and coming up with the best solution as a team question number 15 if you were to find yourself in an uncomfortable unfamiliar situation how would you react and lead the team so think about the time when you were in unfamiliar territory and how you led your team through that question number 16 give me an example of your leadership activity where cooperation was essential so think about the time when you took on the leadership position and that required your team to cooperate with each other and with you as well question number 17 can you recall a time when your loyalty was put to the test if so what did you do in that situation and why did you act that way question number 18 when in today's business world is loyalty to your manager especially important question number 19 what about this position interest you so what the interviewer is trying to get with this question is why do you want this job right what they want to know is that you are not just here for the paycheck like there's something about this project that motivates you whether it's really like in the industry we're really passionate about the company we're really liking the product that um you're going to be building right so what's important here is you don't just say like I'm just here to you know collect a paycheck kind of thing question 20 what do you feel makes you qualified for this role so in other words why are you the best candidate for this job so you want to list your top attributes whether it's your past experiences your education um Etc question number 21 what can you take away from your failures now this is a really great question so what the interviewer is trying to get at is are you self-reflective can you recognize that you know you've made mistakes in the past and how did you correct them in the future question number 22 what was your favorite job and why what did you like and dislike about it what was your biggest accomplishment in that role and what was your most frustrating moment while working there so this would be specific to your situation so feel free to pause the video and think about how you would answer this question here question number 23 tell me about any interesting or exciting projects or courses you've taken that would be beneficial to this position now this would depend on the specific role that you're taking on if it's a project manager role you could talk about you know for example PMP courses that you have um taken or interesting projects you have managed in the past question number 24 what are some things that you don't want your career to entail question 25 what is causing you to want to leave your present job now it's really important here to not bad mouth your current employer so you could say something like I want a professional challenge I want to get to that next step in my career you don't want to say I hate my boss I hate my current job my colleagues suck and that kind of thing question number 26 describe your ideal work environment so whether that involves working from home part of the time or going to the office whatever that may be for you question number 27 how would you respond if you learned that someone on your team was in a conflict of interest situation so if there was someone on your team who was in the conflict of interest situation you need to First figure out what that conflict of interest is for example let's say that you know their brother was on was bidding for a contract that your project just issued right so if you found out something like that you have to escalate it to upper management for them to know that there is that conflict of interest and the sponsors or the upper management can decide what to do next but if you do notice there is a conflict of interest on your project you do need to report it to the relevant parties question number 28 if I contacted your former employee what would he say about your decision making skills question number 29 tell me about a time when you've worked on a win-win situation question 30 tell me about your capacity for communicating using words and writing how effective do you represent yourself to others question 31 give me example of a stressful scenario you've been in how did you do in that situation would you do it all over again if given the opportunity how do you handle stress tension and unreasonable demands so in this question you want to give an example of when you are in that stressful situation and what I would mention here is how you broke down that stressful situation into components and then tackled each component until the whole situation has been handled right so they're just looking at you know how do you break down those big messy scenarios into manageable pieces and actually manage through it because sometimes on your projects you are going to run into very stressful situations question 32 can you recount a time when you had to make a tough decision question 33 who is best suited to lead projects and of course you want to say you and why it would be you question 34 who is responsible for the Project's success and you know the answer to this question is everyone on the team is responsible right even though you as a project manager you're leading the team but ultimately in order to succeed everyone is responsible for that question 35 what was the biggest project you've ever managed and what was the budget question 36 what did you do at work yesterday what does your typical day look like question 37 what would you do if your organization encountered the following technical problem and then a technical problem would be presented to you and you have to resolve that accordingly question 38 what made you successful in your last row question 39 how did those contributions impact results question 4D what are the most important steps to accomplishing a project successfully so we want to do here is actually like break down a project that you manage successfully let's say it's to build a dog house right so first is gathering requirements asking the dog owner like how big do you want that dog house to be what kind of materials do you want to use um you know how big of a dog are we building this dog house for does it have cushions what color do you want painted Etc right so first is like Gathering those requirements and then creating that project plan on how do you build this specific in this example dog house right getting the people the necessary skills to do that and actually executing upon that plan until this final product is completed so it's basically taking walking the interviewer through how to manage a project from beginning to end from Gathering requirements to putting together that plan to managing the people and the plan to make sure that the project is complete play this successfully question 41 what are the first steps you'll take to get started on a project what you would do here is make sure you have a project Charter in place like why are we starting this project what is the objective that we are trying to accomplish right why do we need to start this project in the first place so really defining the goals and the kpi so you want to achieve through completing this project that would be the first step that you take once you understand why this project has to be started then you want to start Gathering requirements and creating your plan Etc to actually you know fulfill the goal of the project but the first step is always finding out what you know why are we starting this project like why is this project needed question 42 when preparing for your projects what elements are necessary to account for so you want to think about the triple constraint here the scope of your project the schedule how much time do you have and the cost all right so those three are you know the first things you're going to think about of course there's a lot of other elements like quality and risk and Resource Management Etc but when you're preparing for a project you know by default you need to think about the triple constraint here question 43 when it comes to planning for a project what are the what are some of the items that you consider low priority so this would kind of vary from Project to project um on some projects you know procurement might be a very low priority item because you may not need external vendors to manage a project for other projects it may be a very important item to have good vendors in place right so this would vary from Project to project so you have to give a specific example here question 44 what separates a project from operations so a project is a temporary endour with a clear beginning and end that produces a specific result right whereas operations is daily management so for example you know your project could be that you're creating a new widget right so when this new you come up with the design of the widget you come up you know you go and you talk to the customers and you figure out what customers want and then you build this widget and once you have built this widget you hand it over to operations and operations with you know turnout like a thousand of these widgets in an assembly line or something so that you know all the customers can get one of these widgets so a project is a temporary endour with a clear beginning in the end whereas operations is The Daily Grind daily management within the company to turn out the products that the company is supposed to create another example here is cars so a project could be creating a new model of a I don't know BMW or something right um and then when you create that new model of BMW then you turn it over to operations and the operations with mass produce this new model of BMW and sell it to everyone question 45 how do you choose the appropriate project methodology so here you have to understand what the project methodologies are the two main ones are waterfall where you do things sequentially and then there's agile where you do things in Sprints where you don't Define a scope up front but as you get to know more and more information then you get a clearer picture of what that project looks like right so to choose the right methodology would depend on the complexity of the project requirements so if the requirements are pretty straightforward and the scope isn't going to change very much then you want to use the waterfall methodology if the requirements are more complex and there's more uncertainty on the project than you want to use agile methodologies question number 46 what inputs will you use to create the project management plan so to create a project management plan you want to look at your project Charter you want to look at maybe any templates your organization have for how the project management plan is supposed to look like you want to consult your team because it's not just you creating this plan in the dark by yourself and then presenting to team it's it's a group effort as well question number 47 how do you calculate the amount of work for your project is there a method for estimating in place for this question it will vary from organization to organization because there's different ways to estimate for projects and it would depend on the rules that the pmo for your project has in place so you may want to talk about how you have been able to estimate time or cost for project that you have done in the past you could do so by looking at historical similar projects or you could look at benchmarks from industry averages or from doing some sort of rough math calculation for example if it costed a thousand dollars to lay down 100 meters of wires and we have 10 000 meters how much that would cost right so you can just use um simple arithmetic to kind of find out that sort of estimation question 48 what steps do you take in order to arrive at the project schedule so here you would want to say that you know you first defined what you need to do on the project then you listed out the task and then you sequence the task in the right order so that you also take dependencies into consideration like for example task a b cannot start until task a is finished so once you have identified all the tasks and sequence them in the right order then you estimate the duration of each of those tasks that needs to be completed to complete the project and then you schedule everything in something like a Gantt chart or whatever you want to use to arrive at the project schedule question 49 how do you identify and document the risk associated with your project so you want to document all of the risk associated with your project in your risk register so the risk register would contain a list of all of the identified risk along with risk triggers and their severity and the probability of this risk to occur just as a refresher a risk is a uncertain event that may or may not happen in the future so if it's a negative risk it could derail your project and you definitely want to manage this risk to kind of make sure that the risk with a high probability and high impact on your project don't actually occur if they do occur you do have a fallback plan to deal with them question number 50 what are the triple constraints and these are scope schedule and cost question 51 what are the five life cycle stages of a project so the five life cycle stages are initiation so this is when you're just beginning the project you're initiating the project then the second stage is planning then executing the fourth stages monitoring and controlling and then last stage is closing so you initiate then you plan you execute the project you Monitor and control and finally close the project foreign 52 what experiences or skills are necessary to excel as a project manager question 53 what is your background in project management question 54 what are the five most common indicators that your project will not succeed is a good question here so I really want you to pause and think about this um it's common for interviewers to sometimes ask you about your failures or your projects that didn't succeed so be prepared to talk about them but also spin it around to show that you learned from that how you would do things differently and how this is actually like ended you know even though things didn't go the way that you thought it would go but there were still blessings in Disguise so to speak question 55 can you describe a project that you were a part of and what was your role in it question 56 what are the first steps you take when you're assigned a new project so if you were assigned new project you first want to figure out what stage of this project it is in is it just starting or is it already in execution right so you want to figure out why is the organization taking on this project who is on this project um what kind of documentation have already been made or are there any working a product already on this project so you kind of like just want to take an inventory read any documentation there is talk to the team figure out what everyone's role is figure out what state of the project is and what still needs to be done foreign 57 less than a month into your new assignment as a project manager you realize that the company sponsoring the project is no longer interested what now well you first want to figure out what's going to happen to your project do they want to end the project um or do they want to reduce the funding so first you want a clear Direction on what's going to happen to this project maybe it's merging you with another initiative maybe it's ending it so once you have that clear Direction on what's going to happen to your project then you can proceed so if they do decide that they do want to cancel this project make sure you say that the project doesn't just end you still have to go through the closing processes right so you want to document your Lessons Learned you want to make sure all the vendors are paid you want to make sure that the team members are given notice that the project is ending and they'll be reassigned to new projects where you know um where they need to find other job opportunities to pursue Etc question 58 after the first month your three-month project appears to be exceeding the anticipated budget what measures will you take to manage any increases in expenditures so here you have a situation where you're going over budget so you have to take a look at what your future expenses would be see if there's any way that you can cut back make sure you manage the amount spent on all of the team members see if there are cheaper resources that you can possibly get so with this question that you know you have to ask some follow-up questions what does this project look like what am I managing uh what are the remaining tasks that are still in place right and then see if there are any ways to reduce the cost from there um and put in a tighter budget controls and another good question to ask here is like why did the project exceed the anticipated budget what happened there are there any lessons learned that we can take into the future question 59 can you think of a project in which you were successful and what exactly did you contribute to that success well always good to talk about your successes right so just talk about a project that went really well and what you did on it question 60 you've been assigned as the project manager and the members of your team have already been selected what actions will you take to improve the efficiency of your project team so you get on that project right you don't get to choose your team and you have to manage these people to complete the project objectives so you can talk about different team building activities you can do maybe having one-on-one figuring out what each team member hopes to accomplish uh you know figuring out what their personalities would be strength and weaknesses and then kind of from there you'll be better able to guide the team and when conflicts arise make sure you can you know be able to deal with different team members who are in that conflict listening to both sides and just with this question really showcase your leadership skills and give specific examples as well question 61 you've been given a role as the project manager for a group of fresh College grads and entry-level Consulting staff what measures can you take to ensure that the job is completed in a timely manner so the way that you manage College grads were entry-level staff is no different from managing anyone else you need to ensure that they know their roles and responsibilities you need to follow up to ensure that they have been doing the work that they have been doing you may want to time box them so give them like two hours or four hours to do a specific task and then check up on them to make sure that they have done the tasks properly and you also want visibility so everyone on the team can see what everyone else is working on question 62 what is a project Milestone so a milestone is an event on a project with zero duration and marks an important time it marks an important Milestone on the project for example you know you got all of the foundation done on the house or something like that so it has zero duration and it marks a significant event on your project question 63 this is also a technical question what is Project float so float is the amount of time you can delay a project activity by without delaying the overall schedule of the project and those activities on your project critical path will have a float of zero so it's important for you as a project manager to know what your critical path is because if any event on the critical path is delayed then the whole project will be delayed question 64 due to near daily user change orders and increasing clashes in user demands your project is starting to go over budget and behind the schedule what will you do about user concerns so again here you have a situation where the project isn't going according to plan it's going over budget and it's going behind schedule so what you have to do here is ask some follow-up questions like where do we go for Budget like what were the tasks that we're supposed to do how do we get behind schedule you know how do we get the project back on track like that it would be your main goal right so asking follow-up questions find out what the root cause of the problem here is and then come up with Solutions um to correct the problem to get the project back on track question 65 you've been delayed in an early stage of your project what can you do to counteract the delay which actions will have the most impact on the outcome so you have a situation here where there is a delay on the project so find out what kind of project it is where did the delay happen and then evaluate the options you have to move forward it's important to say like okay so here we have like three different options that we can deal with this delay say that to the interviewer and then keep asking follow-up questions like if we do option one here's the pros and cons ask for more info if we do option two here's the pros and cons and then um and then do option C so the interviewer here isn't really trying to see if you're coming up with the right solution they're testing your logical thinking skills so it's important to not just like jump to a solution right away they want to see your thought process and that you have thought through all of the options before you come up with um what you're going to do question 66 describe what you did to complete a challenging project on time and on budget in an adverse situation pretty straightforward question just come up with an example of a project that you have managed in the past that you have completed successfully here question 67 what does it take to Be an Effective executive sponsor for a project question 68 what is the result of your last project question 69 can you elaborate on your roles and responsibilities again really straightforward question here question 70 what did you enjoy most about your project and what did you dislike question 71 what was the most significant thing that you took away from the project so in other words what is your top lessons learned from your previous project this is again pretty straightforward question 72 can you recount a time when you encountered any difficult circumstance how did you go about managing them so this question is asking you to list something that you know didn't go according to plan on your project and a difficult situation you had to manage whether stakeholders or team it's important here to say that you evaluated different options you listen to different people and really tie in the human aspect of it it's not just like my way or the highway where what I say goes and you really have to show that you have the soft EQ skills that they're looking for for a project manager that's we had to really touch on with this question question 73 tell me about the time when you achieve something significant and what it involved question 74. what similar PM consulting or independent contractor Services have you provided before so in other words just talk about your previous experiences question 75 describe how you would like to work for us as an independent contractor or PM consultant okay so this question is more the interview is just trying to see how you would work sometimes as a PM people work as an employee of the company other times they work as an independent contractor other times they work as a consultant and there's pros and cons to these different methods generally contractors and Consultants are paid much higher than the employee but the employee has the job stability so you have to kind of think about what it is that you value more do you value the health insurance and the job security more or do you want a higher salary right if you just want a higher salary contractor is probably the way to go contractors are generally paid about double the salary of what the employee are being paid but you know when the contract is up they have to look for a new job and so they don't have that job security were the benefits question 76 what other duties will you have to handle so this question is really getting at are you willing to go the extra mile on your job question 77 what are your primary objectives for this new position as a consultant or freelancer in other words what are you trying to get out of the position whether you want to learn they just want to see that you're there for the right reasons question 78 what experiences do you think will be helpful for this task question 79 this project will need a significant amount of blank is that something you'll have an issue with for example this project will require a significant amount of time you may need to work overtime this is something you're comfortable with right question 80 for this task you will need to communicate with insert different types of people can you share an instance where you successfully worked with a similar group so they're really trying to see what your communication styles are and how you resolve conflict remember that you know 80 to 90 of your job as a project manager is just communicating with people so a lot of the interview questions you'll see is the interviewer trying to see how do you handle tricky situations how do you communicate with different stakeholder groups and navigate through tough project situations to help all of the parties come to resolutions to different conflicts question 81 what do you hope to achieve from this new assignment question 82 what are the most prevalent and major hurdles for a project like this what would you do if confronted with these barriers to keep your team on track so it's basically they're asking you if we do hire you as a PM here what are the biggest obstacles that you'll see on this project and how will you deal with it so this is really industry and Project Specific question 83 what is a project Charter and whether it's components so the project Charter formally authorizes the existence of the project so without the project Charter the you shouldn't be starting a project it basically lists out you know the objective of the project why we need this project what's the budget and list the project manager a list of preliminary risks and assumptions and so it's really just like a rough outline of why we need this project um and the funding involved who is on this project that sort of thing and then when this project the project writer has been approved then you want to create the more detailed project management plan basically you actually you know take what the objective was set out here and really get more detailed right so that's when you create the schedule the budget and all of the other components of the PM plan question 84 what document do you want to use as a reference for future decisions so I would ask some clarification question here as to what kind of decisions are you trying to make that would impact Which documents that you want to use question 85 what is the meaning of project scope so again here's another technical question that you may get on your interviews I think by now you can notice that a lot of the questions you'll get will be involving you telling a situation on how you handle specific situations or technical questions about project management so in this case project scope is the boundaries of your project so the scope includes everything that you're going to do on this project as well as everything you're not going to do on the project right for example if our project was to build a house then our scope could be that is two stories tall four bedrooms three bathrooms um 2600 square feet you know and so forth and so forth um you know we're not going to deliver a 3 000 square feet home with five bedrooms to our client so the scope will tell you what is the boundaries on the project what it is that you're delivering and and what the client can expect when the project is completed question 86 what what exactly is velocity and how can you measure it for your team so velocity is a agile metric that measures how many story points your team can complete on average in each spread so let's say that you know your team is averaging like 50 story points um in every single Sprint in the first three Sprints then you can kind of say like our velocity is 50 so in your future Sprints you plan to schedule in that Sprint about 50 story points because that's reasonably what your team can accomplish in each Sprint and you can track the Velocity in the chart so that you can see if your team is getting more efficient as as you know you do more and more of these sprints question 87 what is earned value management and what does it do what are the benefits of you using evm approach to project management I have a separate video that goes into depth about earned value so basically is measures for your project to see you know how closely you're sticking to your project plan whether you are on budget and whether you're on schedule or be high schedule right so I'll link the video in the description below as well question 88 qualities that make you a good team member give examples question 89 when you have lots of tasks to complete and not enough time how do you prioritize question 90 how do you keep your concentration when a major deadline approaches question 91 do you think you can handle more than one task at a time now this is a tricky question here um now study after study have shown that multitasking actually create a lot of waste because as you switch between tasks there is you know the switch over and that creates waste right so generally you want to focus on one task until it is done but when necessary sometimes multitasking may be required question 92 what do you prioritize for your business quality or quantity another tricky question here so now it depends um you have to kind of see the overall cost of quality right so it's impossible to get a hundred percent of your product to be functioning 100 of the time you're going to have a some defects in your products right if you guys you know know the bell curve the bell curve never hit zero so your quality kind of can never be a hundred percent um functioning 100 of the time so it's like what quality standards are you willing to accept right so if 99 of your products are already functioning fine and adheres to the requirements then spending more money on quality may not make sense um then in that case maybe it's better to focus on getting more more quantity but if the quality of your pro products are you know one and two are failing or something like that then it's time to focus on the quality versus the quantity so to answer this question you need to know you know what is a current quality standards um how does your current products adhere to those quality standards and you know if there are low hanging fruits to improve that and there really isn't many low-hanging fruits then you should probably prioritize quantity right so this is a tricky question because it depends on the situation 93 what exactly is evm and how will you utilize it to run projects again I'll link the video for evm below basically evm is a series of calculations you can do that will tell you the health of your project whether you are you know going over budget or you're under budget or if you're going over behind schedule or you're over your schedule right question 94 what is the difference between a project and a program so a program would consist of a series of related projects so basically the project falls under sometimes falls under a program sometimes a project is a standalone in an organization so what I mean by this is that a project is not always in a program but a program always consists of you know one or many projects related projects question 95 how does one go about selecting a project well this would depend on the organization um and it really depends on whether organization is after sometimes see like what the kpis that organization is after like maybe they're selecting a project you know based on lowest cost or to get something done because it's a legal requirement maybe they're selecting a project to meet a customer demand a technological shift um so there's different ways and different reasons the organization May select projects they need to know what the goals what the strategy of the organization is how to know what is a proper metrics to use When selecting a project question 96 what software tools do you recommend using in order to effectively plan and monitor a project well there's many project management tools probably the most popular ones are something like Excel or Microsoft Project or jiara but you can list any other PM tools that you have used in the past to plan and monitor a project question 97 what is risk management and how will you respond to potential risks so here they want to see how you have managed risk in the past so first you want to identify all of the risk then you want to do qualitative risk analysis and this is just you know giving each risk a probability like high medium and low and also a impact which again could be high medium low or it could be on the scale of you know one to ten whatever your your project decides in that case and then for the high priority risk then you actually want to figure out like what is if this Pro if this risk does happen um how much money will it cost our project to fix it and how long will it actually delay our project by and if it did happen is there any mitigation plan that we can do to soften the impact so that in a nutshell is risk management but it'd be great if you give a specific example of how you actually did this process um during one of the projects you have actually managed question 98 what are the results of project closure so basically here they're looking to see that you know when the project ends you're not just saying okay great but like you're actually going through document documenting Lessons Learned letting your team know that the project has ended they're paying off any final bills and documenting all of the results of the project to the relevant stakeholders as well question 99 what are the most popular techniques for project estimation there are many so you can talk about how you did you know either schedule estimation or cost estimation for your projects in the past so there's a neglass estimation which is where you use historical information there's also parametric estimation where you get a parameter and then you just multiply it by the factor of that parameter you can also do bottom up estimation as well there's a lot of techniques for estimation but by PMI those three are the most popular project estimation techniques question 100 what is the first step of launching a project creating a project Charter question 101 what if a customer required a project and timely delivery depended on a sub supplier what strategies would you use to handle the supplier how would you put any necessary contracts in place so this is a procurement question so you have to communicate with the supplier see what their dependencies are make sure that they can deliver the necessary materials that you need for your project on time and there are three different types of contracts you can use on your project it could be Cost Plus it could be fixed cost or it could be time and material and depending on what the supplier is supplying you want to use it the appropriate type of contract in place so some follow-up questions needs to be asked for you to fully understand um what's going on in this scenario and don't be afraid to ask those follow-up questions right sometimes interviewers are keeping things high level and vague for on purpose they're trying to see if you're going to dig deeper and ask the right questions question 102 in this field whatever the one that you're entering for what are the three things that would be extremely crucial for your project success as a project manager so this is really industry specific um just think about this before your actual interview question 103 what indicators would you expect to see to determine the ongoing success of your project and again this would depend on the type of project and the kpis would differ from Project to project industry to Industry so really know your industry and really know the drivers for them question 104 what strategies do you use to deal with difficult individuals slash problem workers question 105 what's the best way to raise morale among your employees question 106 what is Scrum in a nutshell so here they're looking for you to explain the three five three framework which is like the three rows in in scrum the five ceremonies and the three are the facts question 107 what exactly is team building and what are the different phases of it is it a vital component of your business what are the advantages and disadvantages of team building so talk about times when you have built teams what did you do and how did you do it lastly question 108 what have you learned from your previous delivery how did you apply those lessons to your current iteration so will the interviewer is looking for here is they're looking to see how did you do your Lessons Learned and did you actually apply those Lessons Learned to your future Sprints or iterations all right guys so this wraps up this video on the 1008 most common project manager interview questions I hope you learned a lot now if you want to download this entire list to make sure you click on the link in the description below thank you so much for joining me and I will see you soon in my next video ciao for now