Project Scope Definition and Phasing Questions

Focuses on breaking complex initiatives into definable phases with clear milestones, deliverables, and success criteria. Core skills include defining what is in scope and out of scope for each phase, identifying the minimum viable product or first-phase deliverable, sequencing dependencies and critical path activities, estimating timelines and resource needs for each phase, and creating acceptance and rollback criteria. Candidates should be able to describe phased migration plans, release and deployment sequencing, risk mitigation for cross phase dependencies, stakeholder communication plans, and how to adjust phasing when constraints or new information arise.

HardTechnical

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A critical cross-phase dependency fails during peak traffic and there is no maintenance window for an immediate fix. As the Solutions Architect on call, outline an immediate mitigation and recovery plan: traffic control, partial feature degradation, fast rollback strategies, communication to stakeholders, and criteria for declaring service healthy again.

MediumSystem Design

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You must migrate an on-prem monolith to cloud within 6 months. Constraints: four 2-hour weekly maintenance windows, peak traffic 5,000 TPS, DB size 2TB, team of 8 engineers. Design a phased migration plan with major milestones, rollback criteria, acceptance tests, and a timeline/resource allocation per phase. Explain risks and mitigation for each phase.

EasyTechnical

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Explain the concept of the critical path in project scheduling. Describe how you would compute it for a phased delivery using a simple Work Breakdown Structure and dependency types, and why understanding the critical path is essential when sequencing phase milestones and managing risk.

HardSystem Design

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Design a phased migration and rollout approach for replacing a core authorization service used by external partners. Your plan must ensure backward compatibility, meet SLOs/SLAs with partners, minimize partner impact, and address contract and commercial considerations (migration windows, incentives, penalties). Include testing, versioning, and rollback strategies.

HardTechnical

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You're preparing a phased solution to sell to a customer. Provide a template for phase acceptance documentation that the sales team can present to the customer. The template should include: phase objectives, deliverables, success metrics/SLOs, acceptance tests and evidence, rollback triggers and procedures, support model, pricing/milestone invoicing, and legal sign-off points.

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