How to Answer: Describe a time when you delegated a significant work effort to someone else on your team or to another team.
Advice and answer examples written specifically for a Microsoft job interview.
26. Describe a time when you delegated a significant work effort to someone else on your team or to another team.
Why the Interviewer Asks This Question
Program managers are tasked with making work assignment decisions that best serve the needs of their customers and their teams. Interviewers ask this question to test a candidate's ability to properly assess requirements and align work with the resources best suited to deliver it.
Written by Karrie Day on May 9th, 2022
Remember To
Remember to provide an example that shows a transition of work that led to a significant increase in operational or customer value. Interviewers appreciate candidates that understand how to align work within a value stream.
Written by Karrie Day on May 9th, 2022
Answer Example
"One of the business customers I serve in my role as a program manager is an operations group that uses a vendor-developed resource scheduling solution. One of the teams I lead manages the technical aspects of the solution and develops our integration solutions with payroll and billing. Our clients came to our team with a request for a number of new custom reports.
The current reports were handled through customizations to the canned reports available within the vendor application. The new reports would be difficult to build, test, and maintain using the outdated technology available. I consulted with the vendor, and they indicated that many of their clients were moving their reports to Microsoft SSRS solutions. The engineers on my team were familiar with SSRS, but they were by no means experts, so I decided to look to other internal IT groups within our company for help.
I reached out to our HR reporting team, and they had several experts in this space. We worked out a plan to hand off the work to an architect and a few of their engineers to ensure we got the solution right. One of our engineers stayed involved to ensure we gained the knowledge needed to support the new reports and work with the tools available to support future requests. Asking our HR reporting team for help ensured we were able to meet the needs of our customers efficiently and prepare for the future. Our customers were pleased and were able to immediately reduce their time spent compiling disparate reports by 30%"
Written by Karrie Day on May 9th, 2022