3 Tough Technical Project Manager Interview Questions & Answers

What is a Technical Project Manager?

The short answer: a project manager with deep technical understanding.

Now let me go more in-depth and explain the difference between having a technical project manager (TPM) versus just any project manager (PM) on your team.

The most significant difference is their technical aptitude for understanding data center construction, server, network, and storage configurations…

…and the fact many technical project managers have hands-on experience, which helps them understand the complexity of most project tasks.

Bottom-line, a TPM (aka IT PM) will apply best practices vs. best efforts.

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Choose carefully…

Far too often PMs with [very little or no] technical background get tossed into a technology project and then flounder around confused or add to the chaos.

It’s already going to be a challenge getting the work done [for say a data center migration] but then add someone to the mix who only knows PMP principles and the game will be on reporting RED status updates for months. In most cases, IT Managers get involved more than they should have to so the deadline is not missed, or penalty fees are not charged.

Advantages of a TPM vs. PM

What you need is someone with technical project management skills who can engage with the professional staff at a high level and ask the right questions, so the project schedule has realistic dates, and sets the proper expectations.

Also, a TPM who understands Scrum and Kanban is even more valuable.

Why?

Because Scrum knowledge will help when they work with developers’ agile processes, and Kanban will help them to organize and prioritize their technical tasks.

A HUGE key for a technical project’s success is proper planning! And a TPM who understands technology has the advantage over a PM forcing PMP principles to fit into the project plan.

3 Technical Project Manager Interview Questions

These three real-world technical project manager interview questions are designed to be tough and increase your project success rate by filtering out [up front] candidates without technical depth and experience.

Interview Question #1

• Explain your experience in planning and managing data center migrations or consolidations?
• What were some of the challenges your project team encountered?
• And how did you work around them?

If the TPM candidate doesn’t mention network as a challenge, then follow-up with other questions about any network tasks.

Background:

DC migrations and consolidations are regular assignments for technical PMs.

The TPM who has successfully planned migration of physical and virtual infrastructure to another data center location [or even to a cloud platform] will have experienced the challenges of complicated networking and storage issues.

They will also have mapped out applications, databases, and web servers for reconstruction on the other end.

The standard project delays that arise are because of unplanned dependencies or higher than expected complexity.

Often the culprit is a PM who doesn’t get it when someone on the technical team explains the complexity of a task.

It just doesn’t compute, and they don’t go deep enough into understanding the risks or they’re not setting the right expectation with the stakeholders.

Answer Analysis:

Someone who answers this question with examples of moving network segments or circuits (or terabytes of data) is aware of complexity.

Answering these questions with relevant explanations of handling these (or similar) challenges successfully is a valuable PM skill.

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Quick Look

Interview Question #2

• Explain your experience managing projects involving server consolation where 100s of physical servers were converted to a virtual platform?
• What virtualization platform was used and how were the hypervisor servers configured for high availability?
• What type of shared storage was used?

Most server consolidation projects happening involve building private clouds, or migrating to public clouds, or even a combination of both which is called a hybrid cloud. Ask follow-up questions to find out if the interview candidate has  participated in these types of projects yet.

Background:

Server consolidations are common and the technical challenges encountered will teach new project managers the lessons they need to better prepare for unexpected problems.

Problems such as storage and network performance issues after the migration, or servers that require specific firewall ports to be opened so network traffic can pass from the database to the application and web servers.

Also, there is usually a lot of hardware involved that needs a plan on how it will be set up and configured.

This all plays into the project plan and needs to be organized and tracked on a project task list (backlog), or if they’re using scrum, these will be sprints.

Answer Analysis:

A candidate answering this set of questions with answers that go into details on ESXi or KVM hosts for hypervisors, or VLAN configuration for management networks, or LUN configuration for SAN or NFS storage will validate they have been exposed to the everyday tasks involved in performing server migrations.

Other answers to solving network or storage over-subscription problems will also be a validation of experience.

Interview Question #3

• Explain your experience handling the refresh of an application stack from the application down to the infrastructure? For example: refreshing the hardware, operating system, middleware and re-installing and configuring the application.
• How did you plan this?
• What were some of the challenges?
• What would you do the next time differently?

Don’t be afraid to go into a deep technical discussions. Add people from the technical team to the interview panel so they can properly vet the candidates, too.

Background:

This is common in environments that are out of compliance and old servers have been allowed to continue to operate long after the end of life for the hardware and software.

Now due to compliance, the business is forced to upgrade and refresh the application or risk security issues.

This requires a lot of planning and in some cases the development of custom code for remediation of legacy issues with browsers or databases.

It also may be that the database also needs to be refreshed on a newer version and this can make things even more complicated.

Answer Analysis:

Someone who has been through this type of project experience will have learned the technical difficulties and will answer these questions with examples of incompatible databases, or 32-bit applications and operating systems that were uplifted to a 64-bit platform. Or possibly hardware dependencies that need to be worked through.

They may even answer with examples of failures because the application was so outdated it could not be migrated and required a full code rewrite.

Tip!

Need help writing a TPM job description? Check out these technical project manager job listings on LinkedIn for examples <read listings>.

Increase your odds…

There’s no guarantee you will not have delays or problems with any technical project. But I can speak from experience that having an excellent technology project manager leading your project team will increase your odds of success!

When scoping a project, it’s critical to understand the technology and the complexity of making things work together. And probably an essential task for a TPM is setting realistic expectations with the business and stakeholders.

Sure you can have someone give bogus delivery dates because they don’t know any better, but that only leads to frustration due to long weekends to redo work, additional costs for add-ons, and RED status updates because of slippage.

Increase your odds of success by asking the right interview questions. And finding a true ITPM.

Bonus:

Are you a new PM without any technical skills? Here’s a post about where you can find technical training online.

Related Interview Questions For Hiring Technical Managers:

• 10 Tough Incident Manager Interview Questions (Download PDF)
• How To Hire An IT Manager Who Will Get It Done, 24x7x365 (FREE Hiring Kit With Tough & Insightful Interview Questions)
• Interview Questions For A Technical Program Manager (TPM)

Please feel free to add these technical project manager interview questions to your next PM interview. 

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