Project Management Models, Tools, and Best Practices

BizOps teams serve in the project management offices (PMOs) of different projects.

PMOs can take on different types of roles & responsibilities depending on the project, functional area, company, etc. For example, smaller companies might have a single PM or PMO team charged with standardizing project management process across projects, but larger companies might have dedicated PMOs for different functions.

Consultants are often brought in as a form of external project management support, so any consulting background is going to be very beneficial to you.

Project Management Models

The purpose of project management is to drive positive project outcomes. Project management comes in three “flavors”, listed below from least to most authority:

Supportive project management

This model describes project management as an act of facilitation, providing best practices and enabling the team to accomplish more. There is no direct authority in this type of project management.

Controlling project management

This model describes project management as a way to ensure the correct checks and processes have been utilized in the project. Project success is the joint responsibility of the project manager and the functional leader.

Directive project management

This model describes when the project manager is the direct owner of project success. For complex projects, this position is usually held by a highly-trained project manager in big companies, but in smaller, faster bizops projects you may hold this role. You can read more about PMO organization in this guide by Asana.

When PMO is a part of the bizops role, it’s typically quite hands-on. You'll serve as either controlling or directive PMO. Why? Because bizops' responsibility in that situation is to guide the decision-making and execution for the project. However, bizops can also help set up the workflow and provide support as a supportive PMO. This can be done at any stage of an initiative, but it's especially common when handing off successful experiments to dedicated departments for full integration into the business.

Tip: When asked hypothetical questions about how you’d manage projects and handle common obstacles, don’t forget to ask clarifying questions until you’ve got a crystal-clear understanding of what sort of authority you have in the situation. More than anything else, this will determine how you will work with stakeholders and what to prioritize.

Project Management Tools

Project management tools are typically used to track progress against a couple of things:

• Project Scope: are we making progress as expected and able to deliver the outcomes desired?
• Project Timeline: are we making progress at the pace we want?
• Project Cost: what is it taking to deliver the expected outcome?

Regardless of what tools you’ve used, it’s important to hit each of these topics when answering project management questions.

Project Scope

Project questions in BizOps interviews assess your planning and execution skills, so be sure to spend time explaining your process for scoping a project thoroughly. Grab the scoping document from the strategic decision-making module, and specifically call out:

• Project objectives mapped to business goals and guiding principles.
• Some sort of resource plan, covering everything required to meet project objectives.
• Out-of-scope items. This is important because scope creep can easily eat up resources and put you behind schedule.

Project Timeline

For managing project timelines, every company has its own processes. Some use tools like Asana, Trello, Jira, Confluence, etc., all of which are extremely powerful once teams have strong adoption.

Tip: As part of your research into your target company culture, look specifically for which project management tools and resources they use, and demonstrate experience with them. You might find this in company blogs, or sites like Blind or Quora (of course, take these with a grain of salt.)

Project Cost

For managing project cost, the team usually goes through a budgeting process to calculate the expected time and/or resources needed. This process will vary widely by company and team so we won’t go into depth.

Waterfall vs. Agile

If you’re stepping into tech for the first time, it’s worth learning the basics of the Agile approach to project management and how that compares with the traditional waterfall process.

The waterfall approach assumes project phases occur in sequence, and requires heavy work upfront for feasibility testing, defining requirements, and production planning. It’s simple, but often too rigid for complex, fast-moving projects where requirements change often – all hallmarks of big tech.

Agile project management is a more iterative approach that builds release – feedback – release cycles into the process.

Photo via hackr.io

Agile is more flexible and responsive to change. For this reason, it’s preferred by much of the tech world. If interested, you can read more about agile methodology here.

Popular Tools

Depending on the specific BizOps role you’re after, it may be worth getting a feel for the tools used by the bizops team. This varies by company; ask your recruiter during the early stages of your interview so you can practice, or reach out to an existing team member on LinkedIn.

• For lighter-weight, short-term projects with small teams and dependencies, Trello is a great choice. Although Google teams are known for using G Suite, the company does have an enterprise license for Trello.

• For managing more complex projects without sacrificing ease-of-use, Asana, Basecamp, and Wrike are all common choices popular with tech companies. For example, Figma uses Asana and Amazon uses Wrike.

• For very complex projects with multiple dependencies that require heavy integrations with other software tools and internal databases, JIRA and MS Project are go-to's. Engineering-heavy companies like Tesla seem to like JIRA, whereas big, older companies may rely on MS Project as it’s been around for so long.

Tip: It's pretty safe to assume that bizops teams made up of primarily ex-consultants will rely on Google Sheets and Slides because those are so common in the consulting world.

In the absence of off-the-shelf tools or on a one-off basis, you can’t go wrong with a Gantt chart.

A Gantt chart is essentially a breakdown of all the steps within a project, with explicit due dates and assignees for each. At every team meeting, the group can review the Gantt chart together and assess whether the project is progressing as expected and keeps everybody accountable.

Feel free to use this simple Gantt chart as a template.

Running Successful Projects

Building some structure into collaboration is critical for a well-run PMO. Here, we highlight a couple of best practices to facilitate collaboration.

Establishing project governance

Getting the right governance requires establishing the structure of the project, key roles within the project, and defining success metric(s). Read this guide published by Monday (another project management tool provider) to learn more about project governance.

Ongoing project operations

Internally to the team, there should be a cadence for progress updates. One frequently used format is agile, as mentioned above. There are lots of processes that fall under the agile umbrella, so again, we recommend trying to find out what your target company uses, but you can assume it includes frequent team syncs to continuously problem-solve and unblock each other.

See here for a detailed application of agile to product development; the model is applicable to any project.

Reporting project progress

Those outside of the immediate project team may also be interested in project progress, so to the extent that makes sense, make sure to continue externalizing that information.

Here’s a template for what a project report could look like, but make sure to customize information based on the frequency of the report and expected audience.

Recap

Execution and behavioral bizops questions incorporate strategic decision-making, stakeholder management, and data skills, which we've already covered. The only missing piece is project management. You may not have explicit PM interview rounds, but it doesn't hurt to review best practices for running successful projects and do what you can to understand how projects are run at your target company.

To show project management skills:

• Make an effort to understand how projects are run at your target company before you interview.
• Take steps to define what level of ownership you'd have as acting project manager when answering hypothetical questions - lots of decisions hinge on this.
• Leverage any relevant consulting experience managing projects in behavioral questions.
• Practice talking through your process for scoping a project. Include objectives, resource planning, and defining out-of-scope items.
• Prepare to talk through how you established project governance upfront, ran ongoing project operations, and reported progress to external parties on past projects.