Essential Project Manager Interview Questions & Answers:

1. How to handle non-productive team members?

It is the responsibility of the project manager to ensure that the team's output meets the performance requirements stated in the project definition and delivers the goals of the project.

Why a team member would be a non productive? Either he is not up to that level of his work means his skill set is weak. So the answer is coaching/mentoring. Ask Tech Lead to communicate with him frequently & face to face. Don't wait for the task to complete go to his seat, talk friendly, ask indirectly what he is doing and give your suggestions. Don't point him forward some good article to whole team. Give your feedback early to the member. Indirectly share your experience about the problems he is facing. Realize him that he the important valuable member of the project team and you have lot of expectations from him.

Second thing is , some team members are careless or your environment is not productive. The solution is, explain clearly what is expected from the team. Don't wait for status report, communicate frequently with team and remind their goals step by step goals.
Appreciate the members who are doing good work. Involvement is the key to handle non productive members. Don't assign them work through mail. First meet with team, explain the goals, divide the goals into parts & Let the team members pick tasks of their own choice. That will make them more responsible for their task. I think in this way you can change their professional attitude.

2. In Project Management What is a successful project?

First of all it should satisfy all the repurpose of itself and requirements of client. A successful project should be one that meets its cost, schedule and quality goals within engineering tolerances and without padding its schedule or budget. Project Manager should balance between all objectives so that a high-quality product can be delivered according to an efficient schedule at moderate cost.

After finishing it should be easy to operate, maintain & expand.

3. What are the rights of customer in Project life cycle?

In Project/Software life cycle client has the rights:


To set objectives for the project and have them followed

To know how long the software project will take and how much it will cost

To decide which features are in and which are out of the software

To make reasonable changes to requirements throughout the course of the project and to know the costs of making those changes

To know the project's status clearly and confidently

To be apprised regularly of risks that could affect cost, schedule, or quality, and to be provided with options for addressing potential problems

To have ready access to project deliverables throughout the project

4. Why Quality assurance of software is important at its early stage?

Projects that don't set up processes to eliminate defects in early stages fall into extended test-debug-re-implement test cycles that seem interminable. So many defects are reported by testing that by the end of the project, the "change control board" or "feature team" may be meeting as often as every day to prioritize defect corrections. Because of the vast number of defects, the software has to be released with many known (albeit low priority) defects. In the worst case, the software might never reach a level of quality high enough for it to be released. That's why software testing is important from day one.

5. What is Project Planning?

Project Planning defines in detail the project activities and the product that will be produced, and describes how the project activities will be accomplished. Project Planning defines all major tasks, estimates the time and resources necessary to complete them, and provides a framework for management review and control.

Project Planning activities include defining and documenting the following:

► Work to be performed,
► Project goals,
► Estimates for planning, tracking, executing, and controlling the project,
► Commitments of the affected groups, and
► Project alternatives, assumptions, and constraints


Planning is a process that includes activities to estimate the size of the project, the scope of the effort, and the resources required to complete the project, as well as steps to produce a project schedule, identify, assess and manage risks, and negotiate commitments. Several iterations of the planning process may be performed before the Project Plan is completed.

6. Why customer developer partnership is important?

The success of any product involves meeting expectations-those of the ultimate customer, those of management stakeholders, and those of the project team itself. While delivering something useful to the customer remains paramount, keeping all the participants informed and involved is critical to success.


If we want products that deliver outstanding customer value, then we must have a customer-developer partnership, one with responsibilities and accountability on both sides (and similar relationships with key suppliers). Agile teams constantly seek customer involvement and are always asking the question, "Is what we are doing useful to you in meeting your business goals?"

7. How you can deliver the product fast to costumers?

Simple solution is Keep away your team from non-value adding tasks

Customers need working product not documentation. Project managers need to relieve the project team from as much compliance work as possible, even if that means taking on the tasks themselves. So that the development team can concentrate on the real work.


Agile frameworks do need minimal documentation and a mechanism to convey knowledge about project success and failure to others in the organization. The answer isn't eliminating either documentation or process, but approaching both from a simplified, lean, barely sufficient, just-enough perspective.

8. Continuous feature delivery benefits in Agile Software development?

To get the customer feedback early. Iterations allow you to manage risk sooner-you do not have to build the whole product to find out if you can meet a particular specification.

Another benefit of continuous feature delivery is that for some products, software being a good example, incremental releases can provide early benefits. Rather than wait 12 or 18 months for new software features, incremental delivery can provide quarterly or even more frequent ones. Incremental releases can favorably alter ROI calculations because they allow product managers to address opportunities that would be lost in 18 months. However, even though some products can be developed iteratively using simulations or prototypes, they are very difficult to release incrementally. As the battle over Web browsers showed in the late 1990s, customers often can't assimilate new product releases every three to four months.

9. AS a Project Manager How to add value to your project?

I am telling you few ideas in my mind that as a project manager how you can add value to project & real customer.

Feel the real need of customers. Don't act as a sales person. Work as consultant. Which can add much more value to them and hence people will trust you and that trust will help you to grow your business.

Prepare a presentation of their relevance in simple way and with few words. Provide the satisfied references.


Another concern: As a project manager How to justify the time & human resource cost to other persons with different skills like Sales Manager? So Idea is divide all tasks in micro tasks and try to explain all these in detail. Try that he becomes a part of the team and able to realize the facts.

Dropping price doesn't make any sense. Because if you do it, you have to do it again & again to sell your product. Instead of that increase your product quality.

10. What project management software you use to manage your project?

Yes This is a common Project management interview Question asked to every project manager.

Generally project manager use Basecamp. Another software is activecollab. This is can be installed on your own server.

These tools provide ability to set up unlimited numbers of projects, assign members to the projects, set tasks, set milestones, add pages, add tickets, upload documents to the project, have discussions within the project and set numerous access levels for management, staff and clients.