Team Lead Interview Question:

How project or team leader differs from Manager with respect to project management?

Submitted by: Administrator

Ideally the Project Manager's focus is fully on pure Project Management (Scope of the project, customer interaction and project budget etc.). The team lead is more of a technical position with a touch of project management.

I would say Team Lead is 70% technical and 30% managerial.

When it comes to management, team lead's responsibilities limited to technically managing his/her team, task allocation, solving show stopper problems, assisting if any of the team members cannot proceed further, mentoring team technically and functionally, conducting status meetings, gap analysis etc..

Team lead also coordinates with project manager on identifying correct resources for projects. Team lead should know who is best in his team to do a certain task.

Team lead also should leverage between quality of code and time lines. If required, team lead needs to spent extra effort on top of regular working hours and need to convince team members to stay back when required. Although working late hours is surely a project management problem, however sometimes it is required!
Submitted by: Administrator