Senior Project Manager Mock Interview
Master 77 Senior Project Manager interview questions covering stakeholder management, risk mitigation, and delivery strategy.
Question 44 of 77
Describe your preferred method for estimating the budget for an agile project.
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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,
Agile projects are estimated in various ways depending on the team, the company, and the nature of the project. Interviewers ask this question to test a candidate's ability to describe a systematic and intelligent method for providing an accurate project budget when the scope details for the project are limited.
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 answer this question with a generally accepted method of story or backlog item estimation within your response such as t-shirt sizing, or story point estimation. While some teams have adopted completely custom methods that work well, your interviewer is more likely to resonate with an answer that describes a method that is well known to be successful in an agile setting.
Also, remember to describe any inputs that are required before your process can begin as well as the outputs from estimation. Try not to overload your interviewer with unnecessary detail, but it is helpful to provide a well-rounded answer.
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,
"I prefer to use a mix of popular methods for providing an estimate for agile project budgets. First, I work with my team to complete a high-level project discovery effort. The outcome of these discussions is a product backlog with stories that are detailed enough that our team can point them. Additionally, we prioritize the features into must haves, should haves, and nice to haves. These categories are based on customer need and what is required from a technical perspective in order to build the product.
From there, we use a Fibonacci-based story pointing system to estimate each user story or backlog item. If I have worked with the team before and they have worked on similar projects in the past, I have a previous velocity and cost per point number I can use to develop my budget. If not, I ask the team to task out the work for several of the stories so that I can add up the hours and develop a cost per point and velocity estimation. I pad this number slightly if there are a lot of unknowns or risks to the project.
My final step is to develop a budget that shows the cost for the must haves and how many sprints they will take to be completed. I then figure out the numbers for the should have and nice to have items. The end result is a range that my clients can use to decide on a budget. I usually recommend allowing for at least all of the must haves and should haves as well as a portion of the nice to haves."
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