Jaa

Key Questions for a PM at patterns & practices

  • Artikkeli

Note: This article is updated at Program Manager Abilities at a Glance.

I was looking for some of my old job descriptions for PM positions in patterns & practices to help out a colleague.  While I didn’t find them, I did find some of the questions that I have used to evaluate PM effectiveness:

Project Management

  • ability to create a work breakdown structure (WBS)?
  • ability to manage a budget?
  • ability to organize scope in terms of incremental value?
  • ability to cut scope to manage quality, resources and effort?
  • ability to ship within short cycles? (1 month vs. 3 month vs. 6 month vs. 12 months)
  • ability to get budget support from another group/org?

People/Team

  • ability to work effectively cross group?
  • how have you resolved design conflicts among a team?
  • how have you verified user experience?
  • lead a team through execution?

Technical Expertise

  • ability to identify emerging and future problems/trends?
  • ability to identify key technical challenges within a problem space?
  • ability to identify and evaluate solution candidates/options?
  • ability to identify appropriate guidance within a given domain for a broad audience?

Customer Focus

  • ability to vet design decisions with customers?
  • ability to build, organize and rationalize customer data?
  • ability to organize guidance against user experiences?

Communication

  • ability to sell an idea?
  • ability to communicate technical concepts to individuals outside the internal development team?

Microsoft

  • passion for working for Microsoft?
  • why Microsoft?

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 24, 2010
    JD - great set of soft metrics! Do you have an insight on how you can measure PM effectiveness on an agile team? Given that most often PMs perform the roles of product owner and scrum master and the spec delivery is not as detailed as that in traditional models, it would be interesting to hear your take on how you evaluate performance in these situations.
  • Anu
  • Anonymous
    June 24, 2010
    The comment has been removed