Diana Khachatryan

• Schedule Management

  Demonstrated

  Diana demonstrated good analytical thinking in the scheduling exercise. Before trying to produce a timeline, she asked about dependencies, risks and more details about the project. She considered parallel development, allocation of the two full-stack developers, testing, client acceptance and bug fixing, and thought about switching developers to other work if design became a blocker. This shows that she understands that a schedule is not simply the sum of task estimates. The main gap was that she focused primarily on delivery activities and missed some project setup/planning activities, such as tool setup and team agreements.

• Stakeholder Engagement and Requirements Gathering

  Demonstrated

  This appears to be one of Diana's stronger areas. She understands that meeting written requirements does not necessarily mean that the client will be satisfied. When asked why this could happen, she emphasized periodic meetings with the client to check whether what was originally agreed is still valid and the importance of keeping stakeholders involved throughout the project. She also understands the value of detailed requirements and acceptance criteria and specifically mentioned avoiding generic formulations. Further development could focus on more formal stakeholder analysis, expectation management, negotiation and structured requirements techniques, but the basic practical competency is clearly present.

• Team Management

  Demonstrated

  Diana demonstrated good people-management instincts. In the underperformance scenario, she would first have a 1:1 conversation, listen to the employee and identify the root cause rather than immediately treating it as a performance problem. She differentiated between work-related and personal causes, considered support, HR involvement or time off where appropriate, and specifically said she would not blame the employee publicly. She also handled the project-closure communication scenario well: she would recognize the team's good work, explain the real reason for closure and reassure employees that closure was not caused by their performance when that was the case. She could further develop coaching, conflict management, motivation and team-development techniques, but her practical approach to people is a clear strength.

• Project Management

  Partial

  Diana shows good thinking and asks useful questions before making decisions. In the scheduling case, for example, she immediately asked about risks, design readiness and dependencies between features, and thought about how development and testing could run in parallel. She also correctly recognized that missing a milestone does not automatically mean the whole project has failed, and that client satisfaction and the overall outcome matter. At the same time, her PM knowledge is mostly based on practical experience rather than a strong methodological foundation. She did not know contract types, and her project delivery plan focused mostly on features, estimates, deadlines, testing and Sprint distribution, missing some broader planning areas. Her understanding of project vs. product was generally logical but not clearly structured around project/product scope and life cycles. She would benefit from strengthening PMBOK fundamentals, especially planning, life cycles, constraints, contract types, baselines, change management, governance and integrated project management.

• Risk Management

  Partial

  Only a small part of Risk Management was assessed, so this status may be not quite accurate. Diana showed good practical logic when discussing a sponsor who wants to deal with a risk only after it happens. She recognized that the response depends on the criticality of the risk and suggested preventive actions to reduce the likelihood and impact. Based on the available data, she should strengthen the full risk-management cycle: identification, probability/impact assessment, prioritization, response strategies, risk ownership, triggers, contingency plans, residual/secondary risks and monitoring.

• Process Optimization

  Partial

  Diana has a good instinct to look for root causes rather than immediately react to symptoms. When answering related questions, she considered lack of resources, task distribution problems, motivation and the use of 1:1s or retrospectives to understand the underlying problem. The weakness is that her process analysis is mostly focused on individual symptoms rather than the workflow as a whole. Her decisions are based on subjective optinions and are not data-driven. She should develop a more systematic process-optimization approach: map the current workflow, collect data, identify bottlenecks/root causes, define improvements, implement them and measure whether they worked.

• Quality Management

  Partial

  Diana has a practical understanding of quality at the requirement/task level. She understands that requirements need sufficient detail, acceptance criteria need to be clear, and generic formulations should be avoided. She also connects client satisfaction with ongoing validation rather than assuming that technically meeting documented requirements is enough. Her formal quality-management knowledge is limited. She did not know Definition of Ready, Definition of Done, quality gates or exit criteria, and she tended to look at quality primarily at task level rather than from the overall project/process perspective. She should strengthen DoR/DoD, quality gates, verification vs. validation, acceptance criteria, testing/quality strategy and overall quality management.

• Agile Methodologies

  Gap

  Diana has a practical experience working in a Scrum-like environment, however, whatever she described, was not Scrum or other hybrid (e.g., Scrumban) framework. She has some knowledge in Scrum events, Sprint, prioritization, but the fundamental knowledge is missing (that comes from Agile mindset and Scrum framework). Agile theory and metrics are a significant gap. She should revisit Agile principles, Scrum (Scrum guide), it will also be good to study Kanban, and other frameworks to be able to setup project processes and frameworks from scratch by understanding the project specifics and other components.

Schedule planning: Before answering the scheduling case, Diana asked whether there were dependencies, whether the design was ready and what risks existed. She then considered parallel development and testing instead of simply adding all feature estimates together. This was one of her strongest analytical answers. Client satisfaction: She correctly recognized that a project can be delayed while the client can still be satisfied. This shows that she does not define project success only through meeting a deadline. Stakeholder engagement: When asked why a client might be dissatisfied even though requirements were met, she suggested regular meetings to check whether the original agreement was still valid and keeping the client involved throughout delivery. This demonstrates good practical understanding of expectation management. Team management: With an underperforming developer, her first response was a private 1:1 to understand the root cause. She considered both work-related and personal factors and would look for ways to help instead of immediately blaming the employee.

1. 1

   Specific focus on Agile values, principles, and practices. To gain broader knowledge / theoretical as well, to be able to manage projects more professionally rather than just based on intuition.

2. 2

   Suggested reading: PMI PMBoK, Agile Guide, Scrum Guide, Kanban Guide, Agile metrics in Action (or similar articles, videos, etc.)

3. 3

   To work on enriching her formal project management glossary.