Tailored Interview Role Plays Series: Part 4

Urgent Situation

Series Part 1 | Series Part 2 | Series Part 3

I designed some interview role plays to assess candidates if they are fit for the roles which were actually based on real life experience might be useful for you too:

Ali (principal engineer on your team) comes to you and says that he had got an offer from X company in USA and needs to leave in 1 month (legal duration). PMO had planned 4 critical projects on him and there is no backup. What possible actions you can do in this situation? How will you approach this situation?

It depends, right? So the candidate needs to start analyzing and investigate the situation.

• First action should be to understand if there is some kind of backup in your team, ideally you should not create single point of failures. Let’s assume it is an exception and there is no backup
• An action plan needs to be designed to contain the situation with owners and timeline. In the end life goes on, customers and projects need attention
• If the candidate states that he/she will directly own the work Ali is doing, you should push the candidate that you are also swamped with work and you have other responsibilities that requires your attention. From there candidate should offer about prioritization alternatives
• You can thicken the plot by stating you are not able to find replacement after 2 months and your team started to burn out. Candidate should try to analyze why is it so. Are there another teams or internal candidates in the organization for assistance?

This is an example of urgent situation since people are professionals and can find other jobs elsewhere, as the manager you are responsible for keeping the lights on by planning proactively all the time; with plans A, B, C, D, etc. adapting to whatever is the situation.