NEW - General Questions

Question 1

Tell me about yourself

Answer 1

About Myself

• PMP, 10 plus ys exp in Information Technology, Education and Events Management Industry
• Types companies: Worked in private, start up environments and large public institutions
• Environment: Worked waterfall and agile environments
• Types projects: Change/transformation, operations
• Team: experience managing cross-functional and multinational team
• Core technical skills: I have great PM abilities gained over the years working on projects - planning, including …, progress tracking/forecasting and reporting
• Core soft skills: adaptable(bility), effective communicator, life-long learner & quick learner, great motivator

Question 2

Why do you want this job?

Answer 2

• Passionate about job (why)
• I am also enthusiastic to see the change and transformation that happens because of the project (during or after)
• I enjoy stakeholder interaction, working with people from diverse backgrounds, getting to know their perspectives, getting challenged
• Constant learning and improvement opportunity

Question 3

Why do you want to work for us?

Answer 3

ACCENTURE

• I love you’re a market leader, innovative and creative.
• Always striving to improve.
• Great and complex clients, with lots of opportunities or transformations
• Massive organization - More than 600k employed across 120 countries
• Great leadership
• Diverse and talented people
• Lots of learning opportunities through training and other initiatives

IRISH LAW SOCIETY

Question 4

What do you know about the company - ACCENTURE?

Answer 4

• Accenture stands for Accent on the future
• Fortune 500 Company - it’s in the 500 largest companies by Fortune magazine
• Founded in 1989
• Originally part of Arthur Anderson accounting firm
• IPO in 2001
• Incorporated in Ireland in 2009
• Current divisions/lines of business include strategy & consulting, interactive, technology and operations (might change in the future)
• Massive global organisation, with more than 600k employees across 120 countries
• Great network of clients across different industries,
• Leader in innovation of lines of business
• Offers Great learning & upskilling opportunities
• Working w/ diverse teams and skill sets and great culture
• Supportive leadership

Question 5

What do you know about the company - IRISH LAW SOCIETY?

Answer 5

add

Question 6

What do you know about the company - POPPULO?

Answer 6

add

Question 7

Why should we hire you?

Answer 7

Alignment with company’s culture and values and the experience and skills needed for the role

Looking at the job description and researching the company, I think that my experience on project planning, tracking/forecasting, and risk management really align with what the organisation is looking for.

Question 8

What are your strengths?

Answer 8

1. Flexible - Changes in ways or working, adaptable with company culture & gelling well with the people in the team
2. Quick learner - Coaching, project management, fitness & therapy, meditation & mindfulness
3. Improvements - Proactively identifying opportunities to streamline processes and organising and structuring the work / projects
4. Planner & Initiator - which includes scheduling, resourcing, budgeting, tracking/forecasting and managing risks
5. Team player - Past experience of managing multiple stakeholders and working with large teams / across functions or multinationala

Question 9

What are your weaknesses?

Answer 9

I like to see my weakness as my learning & growth opportunities.

1. Speaking - Getting in front of the groups and presenting. And the only way to grow for me in this area is to get in front of the people and present.

I’ve had many presentations, training, and meetings where I had to present. I’ve intentionally put myself in front of people to present and at the same time I also took some courses on public speaking and online facilitation - Coaching certification has really helped me in tackling speaking situations as well.

1. More Focussed work & prioritisation techniques - Too much time spent on email and checking emails too frequently. I’ve learned to bucket my email time and only check it at specific hours so that for the rest of the time I can focus on more relevant project work and getting things done.

Question 10

What accomplishment am I most proud of?

Answer 10

PROFESSIONALLY

1. Streamlining the application process for a recurring project
2. Standardise & increased the productivity of the team in my previous job in terms of people, process & technology

PERSONALLY

1. Walking English Camino in Spain - 120 kms in 5 days

Question 11

What do I think I will be doing in this role?

Answer 11

ACCENTURE

Responsible for programme planning, execution, tracking/forecasting, stakeholder engagement, risk management and benefits management for the business sponsor.

IRISH LAW SOCIETY ?

POPPULO?

Question 12

What projects have you worked on in previous roles?

Answer 12

1. Driving change/transformation (SCC)

• People, process & technology changes
• Implementing new technologies in operations / studying programs-curriculums
• Ways of working by streamlining processes

2. PM in operations - orchestrating the planning and execution of events/congresses

Question 13

What experience do you have that is relevant for this role?

Answer 13

• Experience working on projects in waterfall and experience working in agile environment.
• Experience working on cross-functional & international teams

ADD?

Question 14

How did I manage risks?

Answer 14

• Strong risk management from the get go
• Before starting the proper planning, have a high risk plan in place
• Process:
• Identify risks (think of scope, schedule, costs, competition, governance, legal, operations, technology… what could go wrong)
• Analyze in terms of impact and probability
• Prioritize based on analysis
• Prepare risk responses for high priority risks (avoid, mitigate, transfer…)
• Plan contingency reserves for foreseen risks
• Plan mngt reserves for unforeseen risks (can go up to 30% on IT projects)
• Constantly monitor risks, create risk logs, assign responsible persons (usually on task levels)

Question 15

How did I manage risks - example?

Answer 15

Hazard - Terrorist attack

Hazard - unforeseen and unplanned event / You can’t predict it, but it’s important how you react to it to reduce the impact of it!

SITUATION: 5 team members were supposed to be sent to training when terrorist attack happened the night before the departure. The problem was that this activity had a dependency, which meant we couldn’t proceed with certain work if training was not done. Risk on the schedule and costs.

TASK: evaluate impact on the schedule and costs, recover the damage and get the project back on track

ACTION:

• 12000 E lost money - Re-negotiated agreements with vendors - we lost only travel money (2000 E instead)
• Re-scheduled the tasks- to work on not dependent tasks and push the training and dependent activities further down the timeline
• Informed the sponsor of the event, severity of impact and asked for budget increase for lost travel costs (denied).

RESULT: Managed to deliver on-time, scope and budget. The only risk that stated after balancing the estimates was the risk of going over budget. Luckily there was an activity that costs us a bit less than it was planned and we also made some more sensible costs decision after the risk event, so we managed to get budget back on track by the time we ended the project

Question 16

Time I failed

Answer 16

New software for accounting -

1. Functionalities / requirements were not captured correctly which led to mis-understanding & delays in building the software application
2. Adoption - people & process adaptation was bad

Very important to embed & sustain the change to improve the process

Question 17

Time I made a mistake

Answer 17

SITUATION: Forgot to include important stakeholder into funding application which resulted in 5k EUR loss.

TASK: to inform the stakeholder about the mistake, consequences and possible solution. Lack of information about key stakeholder involved in the process

ACTIONS

• Researched possible alternative
• Explained the situation, corrective actions in terms of recovering the funds

RESULT:

• Immediately called the company. Explained that they are able to apply again
• Improved collaboration - took more of our students for internship, helped us with different process improvements initiatives related to internships

LEARNING

Always go the extra mile for the clients you’re working on and strive to improve relationships.

Question 18

Involved in a conflict

Answer 18

EU projects: Deal with difficult personalities who have been there for long time and didn’t take suggestions to improvement in a positive manner, typical public sector mindset and culture change

STORY: Accounting conflict > missed stakeholder in the project, not included in programme financial/accounting workshops organised by the sponsor.

• Understand the root cause of the conflict
• Explained the benefits associated with change
• Work together closely to improve work & relationships

Brightflag : Not conflict - resistance to change in last projects in Brightflag - suggestions for improvements that involved multiple teams and actual functionality of product itself

Additional work for review teams to improve insights & reporting mechanism

STORY: CSMs pushing for additional work to gather insights for the clients. Took a lot of time and additional legal analysts effort/over-time

We collaborated to identify possible reporting solutions to get automated feedback/insights.

Question 19

Dealing with a difficult customer

Answer 19

Client added additional requirements just before the delivery of the project

Question 20

Completed a difficult task under pressure

Answer 20

Situation:

The previous job - in 2018 - I had to return the signed financing contract on a very short timeline.

Why was this difficult?

1) 400 signatories spread across the whole county
2) difficult and under pressure? We had to return the signed documentation to the ministry in 7 days after they delivered the documents

Question 21

A time you disagreed with your boss

Answer 21

My boss asked me to re-negotiate the yearly vendor contract and reduce costs by 10%

Happy to share the time when I had the opportunity to share my perspective with my boss.

Question 22

How did you handle difficult situation

Answer 22

Natalija - underperforming & health issues

Situation: noticed that one of my top performing members started delaying the work, it wasn’t yet so critical, but I just wanted to proactively handle the situation as I knew she’ll be delivering a key piece of work at some later stage of the project.

Question 23

Time working in a team

Answer 23

Situation: HR asked us to improve the onboarding experience/process

Action

• Collaborated with HR and within the team to align on the goals of the project
• Collaborated within the team to map “as is” process,
• identified pain points -possible waste, duplication, errors
• interviewed recent hires about the onboarding experience
• identified gaps
• made an action plan, divided work and did the work

Results: Project was a great success where the whole team benefited. Onboarding time was significantly improved, it decreased from 3 months to 2 months, by 33%. After 2 months, analysts were fully capable of doing the basic tasks independently.

Question 24

Prioritizing work - time management

Answer 24

• Plan my weeks and days, I plan the week ahead on Friday just before and of the day and I plan my weekdays at the end of each work day.
• Methodology - I use 4 quadrants to prioritize my work - important and urgent quadrants
  
  • make sure I most of the time work on important and not urgent tasks, this way I am sure to be moving towards my goals
  • delegate anything that’s urgent and not important
  • Manage important and urgent work
  • Eliminate the not important and not urgent work
• Tools: I use google calendar and schedule everything in advance including on the task level so I know every time of the day what task I should be working on
• Bucket the time I spend on email and when I do project or other work
• I regularly include breaks and lunch - because empty bag doesn’t stand alone
• Review and planning sessions - At the end of the week I would also review how I performed during the week - how much of what was planned did I actually accomplish, what were the bottlenecks, was it overscheduling, was it unplanned events, meetings and adjust the schedule accordingly.

Question 25

What is your communication style?

Answer 25

I see myself as being quite direct in terms of communicating what’s on my mind and what are my work related needs, I am also honest and transparent, I am always respectful and empathetic - listening and trying to understand other’s perspective and POV.

Question 26

How do you bild rapport with colleagues / team members?

Answer 26

Harmonious work relationships with colleagues in the office can lead to more productivity and efficiency and also help nurture a culture of support, understanding

STORY - Make sure to speak with coworkers about informal themes, personal things of interest, learn about their lives around coffee machine, printer, taking joint lunches or on the meetings to have a bit of small talk before start

Question 27

How do you ensure effective comms?

Answer 27

• include speaking, writing, listening well, asking good questions, watching your non-verbal comms cues (tone, pitch, facial expression, body posture),
• providing the right information to the right stakeholders at the right time and level

Story

Coaching certification - Improved listening and questioning skills by attending coaching certification

Improvement: adopt more of coaching comms/leadership style/WoW, improved relationships with my direct reports, increased productivity, engagement and interest in work and process improvements

Reporting segmentation on the projects - different levels of reporting and information flow, taking in regard type of stakeholder, what information they need, in what form and at relevant times.

Ex. Mngt on our / client-side - high-level progress information on monthly basis, directly involved point of contacts - detailed reports on triangle, issues, risks, …

Question 28

How would you explain a complex concept or a technical problem to a colleague or client who is a layperson in your area of expertise?

Answer 28

• I focus on presenting the most relevant information.
• Breaking down complex concepts into smaller parts
• Presenting a smaller isolated parts/process into where it fits into the whole process to get the big picture
• Keeping the information concise
• Linking new information with familiar concepts or knowledge they may already have.
• Draw pictures or diagrams because visual cues ca

STORY 1

• S - explain machine learning / AI capabilities to legal analysts team before giving them the analysis of large data set
• A - explain what it is, analyst input improves prediction model which then increases the accuracy of the output/ML/AI applied document analysis and productivity of the LA team, better turnaround time, more spend processed - this seen on RAG status on analysed page, over time more categorization should have green status, which means model is sure of it’s decision/categorization,

STORY 2

Collaboration with development team on feature / functionality solutions - bugs, client or internal teams requirements. Providing greater context, what are we trying to achieve, where does that fit into the current process

Question 29

Announcing bad news to someone

Answer 29

STORY

Situation/Task: I had to inform team member that her contract will not be extended. She was initially hired to deliver certain work on the project, but was also providing additional work outside of the project.

Action:

• private meeting,
• be compassionate and empathetic, understand her situation,
• explain the situation and reasons for mngt deciding this way,
• prepare and present transition action plan to be clear on work needed to be done before finishing the contract
• Presented her with a possible alternative
• Thanked her for here great work and contribution to growth of the company

Result: fired in a compassionate way, we did re-hire her after 6 months for a permanent teaching role.

Learning: importance of compassionate and empathetic delivery of sensitive information, considering the context and the effect of the comms will have on the recipient.

Question 30

How do you prepare for presentations?

Answer 30

• Think of audience,what information are they interested in, level of detail needed to be presented,
• Type: status meeting, workshop, training
• Keep it simple 10/20/30 rule - 10 or less slides, under 20 minutes and 30 size font
• Rule of 3 = repetition at the beginning and end - 3 ideas, 3 subideas, point, examples
• Include storytelling, visuals, quotes, interesting presenters
• Engage with and support the audience - ability to ask questions, use of interactive examples > instant feedback on understanding > enables to provide additional information or context to make it clear of audience

STORY 1 -

Situation: training presentations for the team

ACTIONS:

• Have a clear agenda - topic, purpose, what will they know at the end
• Introduce the topic, explanation of general concepts, why it is important, value it brings to the client, how it is done
• Demonstration of knowledge on 3 or more examples - going together with the participants step by step how to solve the situation
• Provide different complexity of the scenarios
• Provide additional examples to solve after the training to check for understanding and schedule additional training based on results
• Clear, concise slides
• Use of process charts/flows/mind maps / decision diagrams

Result: received a lot of appraisals from my reports on clarity of presentation and improvement of their productivity as they had clarity on the process