IntermediateSITUATIONAL
Reviewing the most complex project you’ve led or heavily contributed to at your current level, imagine that mid-way through, a critical dependency (e.g., vendor, system, or key team member) suddenly became unavailable. How, based on how you actually work, would you re-plan the project, reassign responsibilities, and communicate trade-offs to leadership while still trying to hit essential milestones?
Resume-Based
General

Sample Answer

On our last platform rollout, I led a cross-functional team of 12 delivering a new workflow used by ~4,000 internal users. Halfway through, our integration vendor for document OCR went bankrupt, and that piece was on the critical path for go-live. My first step was to map the impact in concrete terms: which milestones slipped, which didn’t, and what the revenue and operational impact could be. I pulled the tech leads into a 2-hour working session and we built three options: a reduced-scope MVP using in-house parsing, a temporary manual fallback, and a full re-platform with a new vendor. We re-sequenced work so engineers pivoted to front-end and workflow logic while two of us spiked on replacement solutions. I presented leadership with a simple trade-off table: timeline, cost, and risk for each option. They chose the MVP + manual stopgap, and we still hit the original launch date, with advanced OCR pushed one quarter out.

Keywords

Quick impact assessment and re-mapping of the critical pathStructured option set with clear cost, timeline, and risk trade-offsRe-sequencing work to keep the team fully productive despite the blockerTransparent, data-backed communication with leadership to align on scope changes
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