Senior Project Manager Mock Interview
Master 77 Senior Project Manager interview questions covering stakeholder management, risk mitigation, and delivery strategy.
Question 65 of 77
Describe a time when you identified waste on a project and developed a strategy to address it.
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Karrie Day is a certified career coach and strategist with a passion for helping her clients define and reach their professional goals. She offers career advancement services such as brand development, resume writing and critiques, job search strategies,
Waste in lean represents anything that does not add value to the customer. In an IT setting, waste can be identified in a number of locations including both product development team and customer processes. Senior project managers in a lean environment should be able to accurately identify waste, develop a solution for it, and implement the process adjustments necessary to reduce or eliminate it. Interviewers ask this question to identify candidates with end-to-end experience in driving waste reduction initiatives.
Karrie Day is a certified career coach and strategist with a passion for helping her clients define and reach their professional goals. She offers career advancement services such as brand development, resume writing and critiques, job search strategies,
Remember to describe the previous state and the end state clearly within your response. Also, be sure to provide any metrics that support the situation you discuss in your answer. Interviewers value candidates who can clearly demonstrate impact.
Also, it is important to mention any value that was not directly measured such as reduced team member stress, or happier clients. Improvements in areas such as these are indicators of strong leadership skills and happy project teams. Interviewers will resonate with senior project manager candidates that can simultaneously apply the principles of lean while improving customer satisfaction or the wellness of the teams they lead.
Karrie Day is a certified career coach and strategist with a passion for helping her clients define and reach their professional goals. She offers career advancement services such as brand development, resume writing and critiques, job search strategies,
"The teams I currently manage projects for follow lean principles while working in an agile setting. We are always looking for opportunities to improve our processes as waste reduction is a key aspect of lean and agile.
I was assigned last year to work with a new team and I noticed our testers experienced a lot of down time early in each sprint and then they would be inundated with testing at the end. There was an abundance of waiting time before they could even being testing each sprint and it was clearly wasteful. Additionally, they were experiencing burnout at the end of the sprint and I felt like we could improve with a few key process adjustments.
We discussed the opportunity as a team and made a commitment to identifying several small features that could be tested within the first few days of development. We then looked at the sprint calendar and focused on a plan to then provide a steady stream of features throughout the remaining days. It was somewhat unnatural for the engineers to develop things in that order, but they were willing to change to make the process easier.
We also decided to devote a portion of engineering time to the development of automated test scripts. That allowed us to reduce the over all testing load over a period of a few months. It made a huge difference in the tester burnout issue and we were able to increase our velocity by 22% over a four sprint period."
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