Tell me about delivering something with fewer people or less money than the job clearly needed. What did you change about the plan?
Why this works
A resourcing gap turns planning into triage: cut scope, resequence around the scarce thing, or renegotiate the outcome — the one dishonest move is pretending the original plan still stands. The question shows which of those the candidate reaches for first.
Follow-up probes
- What did you cut, and what did you protect?
- Who did you tell that the original plan was dead?
- Where did the scarcest resource actually go?
What good looks like
The gap named to stakeholders early instead of absorbed silently, scope cut deliberately with the protected core stated out loud, the scarcest resource spent where it mattered most, and delivery matched to the revised promise.
Red flags
The team just worked harder while the plan stayed officially intact, quality quietly degraded with nobody told, the missing resources carry the entire story, or the trade-offs were made invisibly and discovered by others later.
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