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I am just a programmer who sometimes wears a PM hat, and even I can answer many of these questions. How do we get some real PMs on here asking and answering questions?

It seems like many of the questions being asked so far are coming from a programmer's perspective. Which makes sense since StackExchange houses vast quantities of programmer types. So how do we attract PMs? Is the strategy just "build it and they will come"?

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  • See my comment to @pawel about editing others answers. Even if you don't have enough rep to actually edit the answers, you can make suggested edits, which you'll actually gain rep for too. The main goal would be to improve the answers not just so you and the original poster gain rep, but also, it will make the site look just that much more attractive.
    – jmort253
    Feb 27, 2011 at 23:22

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If you know of project managers in other industries, encourage them to ask questions here. In addition, here are some things we can do to attract non-programmer project manager types:

  • Write the question to reflect a project management problem.
  • In your question, avoid talking about programming, software engineering, Scrum, Agile, and topics that are specific to software.
  • try to formulate your question so that it could apply to any project management field.

A great example of a question that fits these guidelines is What is the Relationship Between the Kano Model and Quality Function Deployment?

This question could relate to any field, such as manufacturing, and targets product quality. This could easily apply to construction, manufacturing, engineering, software development, and many more.

So far, the community seems to agree that project management is project management, and this includes the comments from active Stack Exchange Moderators.

In addition, the question of Merging IT Management with Project Management has also resulted in some agreement that ${INSERT_FIELD_HERE} Management will fit within the bounds of on-topic questions as well.

Also, see Are Questions about Product Management On or Off Topic.

This question has already been asked in multiple forms already, and it seems that the majority view project management as encompassing multiple fields.

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One thing is what's the site content when some fellow PM drops in. While I tend to agree (after some thought) that we should rather focus on more advanced questions and avoid basic ones I also believe we should care more about quality answers. It's not that hard to find three-sentence-long answer which doesn't really add value.

Another thing is promotion. I think we're still far from the point where a lot of PMs are redirected here through search engines, which means a lot of effort to promote the site on blogs, twitter, etc. We have some professional relationships with fellow PMs - why shouldn't we make them aware about the site? To be honest I think we can do much better here than we do at the moment.

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  • +1 I try not to upvote any short one to two liner/sentence answers. The hit and run style answering just doesn't involve much thought. Since we can't change people's behavior, what we could do is edit answers to add more value to them. When visitors land on the site, they'll see good, quality answers instead of a bunch of down-voted or zero-voted poor quality answers. I've received the good answer badge before because someone added an extra bullet point to an answer that really struck a chord with the community, so this tactic benefits everyone!
    – jmort253
    Feb 27, 2011 at 23:19
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Your question seems to be more worried about the site content. Yes, so far I see there are all kinds of programming-project questions, but almost no non-programming-project question. I think if continuing like this, we should exclude the non-programming area.

About advertising to IT-industry, we can recommend this site to our friends, by blog post, twitter, facebook, ... and a lot of other means. The world is very small when it comes to social relationship: if some Project Manager find this site helpful, very likely that their PM friends will join, too.

Here's an example.

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    I don't agree that non-programming should be excluded. There is a lot to learn from viewing project management from the perspective of other fields. In fact, the more questions there are that are generic to project management, the more useful the site will be to professional project managers.
    – jmort253
    Feb 24, 2011 at 15:09
  • @jmort253: I'm afraid that it would be harder if we have a broader community: no one can tell how broad this field is. And the project-management may sometimes require very specific background to some area, for example, building a skyscraper. This may lead to lots of non-answered question, since it's hard to get the experts from all area to here at once. I think we should start a small, but qualified community about software project management.
    – Hoàng Long
    Feb 24, 2011 at 16:24
  • I'm betting on the fact that my question about how to improve communication on remote teams could also be answered by project managers at the Federal Bureau of Land Management who coordinate the closure of old coal mines. Whether it's software or civil engineering or biochemistry engineering, the technical details should play a very minor role. I feel that there is a lot that I can learn from the PM's in those other fields, and I welcome them with open arms.
    – jmort253
    Feb 27, 2011 at 11:46

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