Project Management

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PM Interview question

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ANTON SHPIGEL Ny, United States
During PM interview you are being asked the following question:

How do you manage your resources?

There is no clarification provided and you can't respond with a question.

How would answer this broad question? Let's assume these are human resources.
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Eduard Hernandez
Community Champion
Product Operations Program Manager Barcelona, Cataluña, Spain
I would put the focus on the end result and say something like "creating a fruitful and healthy working atmosphere that enables a steady project progress".
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Mayte Mata Sivera PMO Leader | Speaker | Author Ut, United States
I really don't like the word resources. When someone asked this question I always replay back with "When managing team members..."
...
1 reply by Keith Novak
May 05, 2020 11:16 AM
Keith Novak
...
It is a rather clinical and impersonal term, but sometimes as PMs we aren't even interacting with all the people let alone managing them.

Considering a project where we are contracting out work such as converting a bunch of older data into a new format for your tool suite. You may never see the people, or even know how many are involved. From a practical perspective, it may not even matter if it is one person or 100, so long as the work gets done. Then it's really about converting tasks into labor hours, and hours into cost.

Somewhere there are people involved, but to the PM who never sees them, it is more a matter of cost accounting. People management may be one aspect of resource management, like if you see your deliverables release curve go vertical, you know that is not physically possible for everything to get done on the same day, but the people management is one part of a larger activity trading cash flow for output.
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Keith Novak Tukwila, Wa, United States
May 04, 2020 12:08 PM
Replying to Mayte Mata Sivera
...
I really don't like the word resources. When someone asked this question I always replay back with "When managing team members..."
It is a rather clinical and impersonal term, but sometimes as PMs we aren't even interacting with all the people let alone managing them.

Considering a project where we are contracting out work such as converting a bunch of older data into a new format for your tool suite. You may never see the people, or even know how many are involved. From a practical perspective, it may not even matter if it is one person or 100, so long as the work gets done. Then it's really about converting tasks into labor hours, and hours into cost.

Somewhere there are people involved, but to the PM who never sees them, it is more a matter of cost accounting. People management may be one aspect of resource management, like if you see your deliverables release curve go vertical, you know that is not physically possible for everything to get done on the same day, but the people management is one part of a larger activity trading cash flow for output.
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