Verdict: passed — Marlena has solid practical project management experience, especially in communication, stakeholder handling, team interaction, and managing difficult situations.
3 demonstrated4 partial1 gap
She would fit best in a Project Manager role with established processes and some methodological support, where she will excel with her interpersonal skills and team management while continuing to strengthen her PMBOK knowledge, Agile/Scrum understanding, and use of project metrics.
Marlena understands that strict adherence to a process can sometimes create unnecessary delays and that good PM judgement requires understanding when controlled flexibility is allowed and appropriate. She can also identify potential process problems from observable team / stakeholder behavior (unclear requirements, insufficient understanding, unclear ownership, etc.). Her reasoning is primarily experience-based, rather than methodical, because the optimization can and should be done also based on the data available (see the metrics). The goal should be to complement her existing practical judgment with data-driven process analysis.
Stakeholder Engagement and Communication
Demonstrated
This is one of Marlena's stronger areas. Her answers consistently demonstrate awareness of stakeholder visibility, communication, and the need to understand stakeholder expectations. he also recognized that continuous stakeholder interaction is important for ensuring that requirements remain valid as circumstances and market needs evolve. Development focus: continue developing negotiation, difficult-conversation management, stakeholder mapping, expectation management, communication under uncertainty, and tailoring communication approaches to different stakeholder groups.
Team and Crisis Management
Demonstrated
Marlena demonstrates good people-management instincts. When dealing with an underperforming developer, she would first gather evidence, discuss the situation privately, and listen to the developer's perspective rather than criticizing the person publicly. This demonstrates a respectful and diagnostic approach to performance problems. Development focus: strengthen structured incident/crisis management, root-cause analysis, lessons learned, escalation thresholds, conflict management, coaching, motivation, psychological safety, delegation, and team-development practices.
Project Management
Partial
Marlena is demonstrated practical management experience with good analytical thinking. She understands important elements such as project planning, importance of stakeholder engagement and team health. Her answers were based on the fact that processes should support project outcomes rather than be followed mechanically. At the same time, there are some gaps in foundational concepts and terminology, including, but not limited to, contract types, assumptions, constraints. I would recommend to strengthen the PM foundations (e.g., as a reference PMBoK), which will make her more professional in her work to act not only logically but based on best practices too.
Risk Management
Partial
Marlena correctly understands the fundamental approach to the risk management. Her response to the question "deal with the risk if it happens" was also positive: she would explain potential impact and financial consequences, present measures to reduce probability, and provide sponsor with sufficient information to make an informed decision. However, she again lacks formal risk management knowledge. Based on the answers she gave, her understanding is stronger at the level of handling a known risk than establishing and operating a structured risk management approach. I'd recommend to strengthen the complete risk management knowledge (PMBoK), which will make her projects success rate higher and the project management approach and client negotiation - more professional.
Scope and Quality Management
Partial
Marlena recognizes weak initial agreement, undocumented changes, poor requirements, and the impact they can bring to the project success. She also differs acceptance criteria from DoD. However, the definitions and logic of DoR and DoD weren't given correctly. I'd recommend her to read about quality gates in software development, try to establish more comprehensive DoR and DoD in her project. Also to understand the importance of measurable success criteria for the project / deliverable / release.
Schedule and Monitoring
Partial
Marlena understands the dependencies, risks when interpreting an estimate. However, again her answers were based on logic and experience, not, for example, the estimation types and techniques that are widely common to use in Agile environment. Development focus should be the theoretical part of formal schedule management and monitoring, that will complement her experience and make the project management more professional.
Agile Methodologies
Gap
Marlena has practical experience in working in Agile environment. She has basic knowledge in differences between Scrum and Kanban. Agile prioritization thinking is also good: she mentioned organizational goals, dependencies, impact, number of affected users, and stakeholder influence as relevant factors. However, as the project(s) she works in doesn't use clear Scrum or Kanban, she doesn't have core Agile knowledge. Agile metrics specifically represent an additional major gap. Marlena indicated that metrics are not an area she knows well and that she has not worked with them in any project. In this area, development focus should be revisiting Agile principles (e.g., PMI-ACP prep book), Scrum and Kanban fundamentals (Scrum guide, Kanban guide), to gain strong knowledge in Agile metrics which will allow her to make data-driven decisionsrelated to the project health and team performance (e.g., Actional Agile Metrics for Predictability - An Introduction).
Evidence
What happened in the session
Project planning: When asked what she would include in a project delivery plan, she mentioned the project objective, milestones, MVP, risks, stakeholders and stakeholder engagement, preventive actions, and team information. This shows she understands the main areas that need to be considered when organizing project delivery.
Stakeholder and requirements management: In the scenario where a feature technically worked but did not meet the client's expectations, she identified several realistic causes: poor initial agreement, undocumented changes, weak requirements, and insufficient ongoing communication with the stakeholder. This was a strong answer because she looked beyond the technical implementation and considered the management process around it.
Crisis management: In the production outage scenario, she immediately considered stakeholder visibility, coordination with technical leads to investigate the cause, and stopping activities such as user campaigns that could increase the impact of the incident. After recovery, she mentioned testing, stakeholder confirmation, and continued monitoring. This showed practical experience in handling high-pressure situations.
Action plan
What to do next
1
Read the books mentioned in the sections (or alternative video courses),
2
Try to apply the knowledge (of course if they are relevant) to the project you are working in,
3
If needed, introduce the suggestions / changes to the C-level / management and show the benefits the changes will bring to (e.g., new type of reporting with clear metrics that will lead to data-driven decision making).
4
Prepare for the PMP exam which is highly valued and accepted in Europe and the USA.
