How to Answer: Describe an operational improvement you delivered that had a significant financial impact.
Advice and answer examples written specifically for a Microsoft job interview.
7. Describe an operational improvement you delivered that had a significant financial impact.
Why the Interviewer Asks This Question
Many projects drive operational efficiencies and cost savings. This question may be included in a Microsoft interview to understand the scale of change the implementations a candidate was involved in had on this area of their client's business.
Written by Karrie Day on June 20th, 2022
Remember To
Remember to focus your answer on an improvement you were directly involved in. Some operational changes that affect a project are a result of business decisions that occur outside of the scope of a project. It is better to select a scenario you or your team created and implemented directly.
Written by Karrie Day on June 20th, 2022
Answer Example
"I worked on a project to automate several resource management functions. Our main client was responsible for all of the management reporting, payroll, and billing functions. They had a system that held all of their resource assignment and cost data within it. The reporting functionality within it was obsolete and the operations team spent roughly 60% of their working time a month pulling data from the system, consolidating it in Excel, and running calculations and pivot tables in order to develop the dashboard reporting they needed for executives.
They would ask my team constantly to run queries for them and it took time away from the development of the project work I managed. I did some research and found that Tableau had the ability to generate over 85% of the executive reporting functions they needed. Additionally, the tool would be easy for my team to support because the operations team could generate their own reports once we set up a data feed.
For the price of a few Tableau licenses, we saved over $30k support time each year. We also cut their team's reporting and analysis time in half in the first year. They were also able to reduce their freelance headcount. Additionally, the executives of the group were able to learn some Tableau basics and gather answers to their own questions on the fly. This helped them to make quick data-driven decisions resulting in operational improvements and cost savings as well."
Written by Karrie Day on June 20th, 2022