Personal Info

Question 1

What are your top 3 strengths?

Answer 1

• Completing complex project by managing stakeholders and team members effectively
• Uncovering priorities and trade-offs
• Attention to detail
• Bonus - Adaptation

Question 2

What makes you good at managing projects?

Answer 2

• Understanding and following PMI PMBOK process.
• Highly organized, prioritizing documentation, status tracking, and communication.
• Leading team members thru respect, listening, clarifying expectations, and holding them accountable.
• Communicating with stakeholders to understand needs, priorities, trade-off, to keep them updated, and bring awareness to challenges and changes for decisions and approvals.
• High attention to quality and detail.
• Passion for doing a good job and putting extra effort to make sure it happens.

Question 3

What makes you good at uncovering priorities and trade-offs and why is that important?

Answer 3

• Key to initiation and planning
• Helps identify project purpose
• Helps ensure stakeholders are happy with the project outcome
• Creates focus, productivity, and positive results from the team.
• Without the right line of questioning and presentation, people can be vague or only see what they want.
• But there are always trade-offs
• Without identifying trade-offs and priorities, projects get confusing, team members become out of sync, and scope creep ensues.
• I’m good at posing the necessary questions and forcing decisions early to handle these issues before they become problems.

Question 4

Why are you good with attention to detail and why does that matter?

Answer 4

• When things go to review, things won’t always be perfect. But it’s important to address preventable mistakes to give stakeholders confidence and reduce the number of rework and reviews.
• Often, I’m not assigned QA/QC, but as project manager I still take an interest in the quality of work being preformed.
• I do my best to understand the objective for each task or deliverable and what success looks like. I learn the details as much as possible even if I do not have the technical skills to complete the work.

Question 5

What’s an example of you leading people to produce better results?

Answer 5

Get procurement to fast track our POs and get vendors to work faster:
* listened to their workload
* paid respect with compliment and gratitude and meeting in person
* clarified expectations from PMO regarding priority
* held accountable by going to his office to meet and keeping in touch via email often, not just to get his status, but to offer support and see what I could do to make his job easier.

Question 6

When have you shown good attention to detail?

Answer 6

Reviewing design drawings.
* Making sure pipe sizes were right
* Make sure MTO looked correct (amount of pipe needed, etc.)
* Spelling
* Ensured design background matched field reality
* Ensured future plans from other stakeholders were considered

Question 7

Summarize your education and experience.

Answer 7

• Finance degree from SDSU
• Imperial Capital - Interned as a research associate and desk analyst
• Teucrium Trading - Wore a lot of hats, started by taking over accounting, then helped with public reporting, then helped with trading where I became the primary futures trader, portfolio manager, and branch manager.
• SPEC Services - Project coordinator, project controls specialist, and project manager.
• Self employed - Online Coaching Consultant

Question 8

Why do you want to leave your current role?

Answer 8

• Incredible learning experience - required leadership, problem solving, decision making, and strategic thinking
• I realized what I truly enjoy and excel at is working on bigger projects and goals, collaborating with teams, and driving results for a larger overall mission.
• Proud of what I achieved.
• Excited to bring my finance and project management skills back into the financial sector.

Question 9

What are your salary expectations?

Answer 9

• First want to learn more about the responsibilities and expectations for the role to make sure we’re aligned.
• Based on my research, I would expect somewhere in the range of $145,000 to $160,000
• Open to discussing further based on full scope and other benefits and growth opportunities.

Question 10

What sets you apart from other candidates?

Answer 10

• Finance experience
• Extensive project management experience
• Hands-on knowledge of the ETF sector

Question 11

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

Answer 11

I’m not set on one specific path, but there I do think about this often. I’d like to prepare myself to walk through one of these potential doors:
1. Program manager - If there are large scale projects that require a program manager, I’d love to step into a role that overseeing multiple projects and work closely with management to align organizational goals and business strategy.
2. PMO officer, director, or lead - Managing and developing project managers to ensure talent growth and successful execution of our project portfolio
3. Senior or principal project manager - I enjoy project management and could see myself thriving while remaining a project manager
4. Operations manager - working on improving day-to-day operations
5. Strategic initiatives lead - moving from execution to strategy
A lot depends on what skills I develop, the areas I develop expertise in, what I find myself excelling at and enjoying most, and where I can best help the company.