Program Delivery interview questions

Handling slippage, unblocking critical paths, and stakeholder comms.

3 questions in Technical Program Management.

Technical Program ManagementA 18-minute read on how the topic fits together, before the questions.Technical program management fundamentals60 short answers on one page, for revising rather than studying.

hard3

hardScenarioBehavioural

A platform team your program depends on has just told you their deliverable will land three weeks late, and it is on your critical path. How do you handle telling the VP the launch date has moved?

Establish the real new date before you talk to anyone, by re-running the critical path with the slip in it rather than adding three weeks to the end. Then present one recommended date with the two rejected options and what each would have cost. It also connects stakeholder communication to the point an interviewer is testing.

5 minsenior, staff, lead

hardScenarioDesign

Every workstream in your program is reporting green, but you are fairly sure the program is going to miss its date. What is going on, and what do you do?

Workstream status is reported against local scope while the date depends on the integration between them, so a program can be green everywhere and still miss. Track the joins - handoffs, shared environments, the first end-to-end run - and change what green is defined against.

5 minsenior, staff, lead

hardScenarioBehavioural

Two engineering teams in your program each insist their work has to come first, and both leads have dug in. You have no authority over either. How do you get to a decision?

Convert a priority argument into a sequencing question with a stated cost, because two teams can both be right about importance while only one ordering is cheaper. Find the shared constraint, price each ordering against it, then take the residual disagreement to the one person who owns both.

5 minmid, senior, staff, lead