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I've been asked to bring "samples" of my management work, and I not only don't have any from previous positions, but am not sure what would be appropriate to recreate.  Can anyone give me advice.

The Recruiter sent me the following request.  "In addition, please bring along any examples/artifacts of your accomplishments in management, specifically around understanding team dynamics and skills assessment."

Frankly, I can't think of what kind of things might be valuable in this circumstance.  Furthermore, I haven't saved any old work.  I could recreate pieces, but I'm not sure what type of things might fit this request.

Has anyone either had to provide this, or asked for this in an interview? 

TomW's picture
Training Badge

It's definitely an odd request. Let's start with the most basic part of the request:

What accomplishments do you have that relate  to team dynamics and skills assessment?

espresso's picture

Just by way of going through my resume: 

1.  Influenced a development team to move to Scrum; obtained agreement from management to change our project management process accordingly

2.  Organized a team to work towards the goal of reducing our deployment time to meet a strict deadline.  This involved putting the project milestones on a whiteboard and having daily standups to make sure we were tracking correctly.

3.  Created a Wiki and status reports to make sure the activities of my team would be reported accurately to management.

The only thing I could re-create as an artifact from any of these would be status reports and the raw metrics behind them, for #3.

tlhausmann's picture
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Espresso,

Did you write formal proposals to implement Scrum? If so, that is an artifact.

When you say "organized a team" did you pull talent from throughout the organization or were you the project manager? Did you actually reduce deployment time--if so by how much? To me, point 2 above must be succinctly stated with numbers. Example: Led 15 person team on $1.2 million accounting software project. Applied Scrum and saved $200,000 by completing project four months ahead of schedule . (or something like that.)

Did you have to prepare any ROI estimates for certain projects?

espresso's picture

Sorry for the delayed response.. I was enjoying a long Christmas break. 

tlhausmann:  I understand what you're saying about specific numbers.. and I know that information.  But I don't have any "artifacts".

In fact, I really only created some minimal artifacts while I was managing (status reports, some spreadsheets with metrics and whiteboards with project status).

I think the interviewer would be most interested in those spreadsheets, so I think I'll recreate those, as best I can.  Not sure what else I can do besides making up stuff (which I'm not going to do).

jhack's picture

It's quite likely that some of the most interesting artifacts are confidential, and you don't have personal copies of them because you respected the companies ownership of them.  

You could recreate the structure (without the detail) and explain why you don't keep personal copies of all the work you do for your employer.  

Hey, you never know - it could be a trick question to see if you respect IP.   

John Hack

akinsgre's picture

Good point John.  I think that I'll recreate the spreadsheets and status reports and then "Mock" the types of Whiteboard displays that I've used in team rooms.

Thanks