Critical Path Newsletter

Three Questions that Separate a Good PM from a Great One

I just finished a round of interviews for a project manager position. I asked the classic questions about planning budgets and releases, dealing with underperforming team members, etc. and got back the classic responses. But I asked three questions I found separated the PMs who coasted through their careers from the ones who were in the trenches with their teams:

• How do you identify the warning signs of project failure?
• How do you identify risks?
• How often do you talk to your team?

How do you identify the warning signs of project failure?

Many PMs tell you that they don’t micro-manage. They trust their team and don't involve themselves in every detail.

That’s great—if it's done right. Even high level managers, need to keep their fingers on the pulse to detect warning signs of failure.

If a PM says "I deal with issues only when my team brings them to me," that's not enough. Some team members are so detail-oriented they don't see the big picture that lets them anticipate problems. Other team members try to solve problems themselves and wait too long to raise a flag.

Great PMs use different techniques to monitor progress and identify risk triggers:

• Project metrics. EVM tracking for schedule and budget, monitoring planned vs. unplanned effort, or watching the slope of the line in an agile burn-down chart.
• Setting frequent milestones and measuring progress against them. If Milestone One is late, this may be the start of a trend, and Milestone Two might be even later.
• Frequent communication with the team, asking probing questions such as "What are the top 3 issues you face in the coming week?" rather than a vague "Any problems to report?"
• Monitoring dependencies and integration. Teams often focus on their part of the project and don’t see major issues before they arrive.
• Scheduling riskier tasks in early milestones. Doing this can flush out major problems right away. If you're going to fail, fail early.

How do you identify risks?

How do you identify the threats to success?

Risk planning separates good PMs from great ones. You need to anticipate what could go wrong and prepare to deal with the situation. But a lot of companies and a lot of managers don't identify risks ahead of time. They deal with problems as they come up, often when it's too late. They always fight the latest fire, not thinking beyond the immediate problem.

Good answers include:

• Lessons learned from previous projects
• Talking to PMs who lived through similar past projects
• Finding comparable experiences online
• Hiring an experienced consultant to help assess the risks
• Formal methods like the Delphi technique.

But the top prize goes to talking to the team and stakeholders directly. Meeting with the team to identify project risks leverages the entire team’s knowledge and working together will spark new ideas.

If a PM doesn’t identify risks or think ahead, their answer to this question will show it. An answer like "We didn’t have time for risk planning" indicates a mentality of fixing problems only as they come up. An answer like "I look at the schedule myself and identify what looks risky to me" might indicate that the PM thinks they know better than their team.

While answering this question, a PM might also come up with the classics like losing a key player or taking a longer time to implement the project. When you see an answer like that, follow up by asking:

• What could you do to mitigate those risks upfront?
• Has that happened to you? How did the planning for your next project change because of it?

Sometimes candidates are able to identify risks… but don’t take the time to truly manage them during the course of a project.

How often do you talk to your team?

The answers to this question tell you a lot. So much about project management has to do with communication, but more doesn’t mean better. Efficient communication that involves the right people at the right times is key.

Who hasn't experienced the dreaded two hour meeting where twenty participants give their status for 30 seconds and spend the rest of the meeting trying to stay awake? If twenty people waste two hours every week, that's a total of 260 person-days per year.

I ask this question in several parts:

1. How often do you talk to your team?
2. How often do you meet as a team?
3. Who are the participants in the meeting?
4. What is the agenda?
5. How long does each meeting last?

There are plenty of good answers. An hour-long weekly team meeting, where the agenda focuses on announcements, upcoming risks, and issues, is reasonable. Supplementing this with daily scrum meetings, or additional bi-weekly meetings with the team lead are good ideas, too.

You might raise a flag if a candidate suggests:

• Daily meetings involving ten people and a long agenda. Especially if they say this takes only 15 minutes a day.
• Round-table status report meetings. Productive meetings usually have a structured agenda focusing on what's coming up, instead of what’s done.
• Frequent one-on-one meetings and no group meetings. Sometimes group meetings are the most efficient way of sharing information.
• Excluding team members, for example, QA or documentation.

Dig deep

Whatever questions you ask when interviewing PMs, listen carefully to the answers. Judge for yourself if the person is answering directly or telling you what you want to hear. Make sure you dig to that deep level to get specific about what they’ve done on their projects.

Being able to speak well is important, but when a PM is in the trenches with the team, it's not dazzling linguistic capabilities that keep the project afloat. The ability to identify the signs of project failure, manage risk, and communicate efficiently with the team are proven ways to steer the ship like a true project manager.