Project Management Stack Exchange is now in public beta, meaning that anyone can now join the Q&A site and contribute by asking questions or posting answers.
The site is in need of more expert level project managers. Many questions are basic questions, but I'd like to see more questions asked that are more advanced. Most basic information about any field is available in droves; it's the specialized, expert-level information that is oftentimes more difficult to obtain.
With three years in the field, I'm no expert, but I'm also beyond many of the basic questions about the definition of change management, for instance.
However, some individuals have posted some thoughtful questions, such as How to approach a project given to new PM during execution with vague requirements?. The question involves a specific experience by a project manager and not a random what-if scenario.
The site is still in it's infancy, and it's success will be defined by it's early members. If you have experience with project management -- no matter if your field is software, construction, engineering, or some other project management field -- create your account today at Project Management Stack Exchange.
Showing posts with label Startups. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Startups. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Project Management Stack Exchange Begins Private Beta
On February 7th, 2011, the Stack Exchange network launched the private beta of the Project Management Stack Exchange website, a Q&A site run by the community to address questions regarding the field of Project Management.
The site is a place where professional project managers can go to ask objective or subjective questions regarding their field. The people who run the site encourage participation by professionals who either have a problem they seek the answer to or who would like to help other project managers improve their skills.
The Stack Exchange network works on a voting system, similar to Yahoo Answers. Users who ask really good, helpful, well-written questions will be rewarded with upvotes awarded by other users on the site. Similarly, users can vote on answers given by other users.
Upvotes and downvotes affect users' total reputation score, which represents how well the community trusts the user. As a user increases his or her reputation, the number of priviledges on the site increases. After reaching a score of 10,000, a user pretty much has access to the same tools as the moderators.
In short, this means that you, the user, runs the site. With enough reputation, you have the tools and community trust to close questions that are off topic or spam, edit questions and answers to clean them up, see vote counts, create chat rooms, and much more.
Out of the 57 total questions as of the time of this writing, here are a few of the questions asked so far:
How To Resolve Leadership Conflicts In The Project?
One of My Projects Was Cancelled Very Early. Will This Be Deterimental To My Career?
Do Technical Leaders Compete With Project Managers?
The Stack Exchange network consists of 44 different Q&A sites spanning from Programming, IT, Website Management and other technical topics to music, cooking, and parenting. It began as a single Q&A site, Stack Overflow, as a place for software engineers to ask objective questions.
New sites first go through a proposal phase where the community picks examples of on topic and off topic questions. After the proposal phase, the site undergoes a committment phase where a certain number of users must commit to asking at least 10 questions or submitting 10 answers in order to help get the site started.
After the committment phase, the site enters a private beta phase. The purpose of the private beta is to seed the website with some really good questions and answers, so that when the site launches the public beta, it already has some really strong content to attract good, professional project managers.
Although the site is still in private beta, anyone can view the current questions and answers by following the link to the Project Management Stack Exchange Site.
The site is a place where professional project managers can go to ask objective or subjective questions regarding their field. The people who run the site encourage participation by professionals who either have a problem they seek the answer to or who would like to help other project managers improve their skills.
The Stack Exchange network works on a voting system, similar to Yahoo Answers. Users who ask really good, helpful, well-written questions will be rewarded with upvotes awarded by other users on the site. Similarly, users can vote on answers given by other users.
Upvotes and downvotes affect users' total reputation score, which represents how well the community trusts the user. As a user increases his or her reputation, the number of priviledges on the site increases. After reaching a score of 10,000, a user pretty much has access to the same tools as the moderators.
In short, this means that you, the user, runs the site. With enough reputation, you have the tools and community trust to close questions that are off topic or spam, edit questions and answers to clean them up, see vote counts, create chat rooms, and much more.
Out of the 57 total questions as of the time of this writing, here are a few of the questions asked so far:
How To Resolve Leadership Conflicts In The Project?
One of My Projects Was Cancelled Very Early. Will This Be Deterimental To My Career?
Do Technical Leaders Compete With Project Managers?
The Stack Exchange network consists of 44 different Q&A sites spanning from Programming, IT, Website Management and other technical topics to music, cooking, and parenting. It began as a single Q&A site, Stack Overflow, as a place for software engineers to ask objective questions.
New sites first go through a proposal phase where the community picks examples of on topic and off topic questions. After the proposal phase, the site undergoes a committment phase where a certain number of users must commit to asking at least 10 questions or submitting 10 answers in order to help get the site started.
After the committment phase, the site enters a private beta phase. The purpose of the private beta is to seed the website with some really good questions and answers, so that when the site launches the public beta, it already has some really strong content to attract good, professional project managers.
Although the site is still in private beta, anyone can view the current questions and answers by following the link to the Project Management Stack Exchange Site.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Dreamhost Hosting Special
I work with a client who uses Dreamhost as the hosting provider for a new web application. My client works with several other contractors besides myself. Some have been only temporary contracts while others have been more long-term. For the initial phase of development, all development was done on local servers, and there was only one hostname for the website.
One of the newest consultants spent just a small portion of his time in setting up some tools that would not only make development more efficient; but also, these tools will help prevent catastrophic mistakes that oftentimes can occur. Manual, repeated tasks are prone to error, and it's not a matter of if a failure occurs, but when will the failure occur.
The consultant set up several domain names for us to use in the deployment process. Previously, the site was deployed to the server under the www subdomain. While this is fine for code that has been tested on the hosting platform, it's not fine when deploying live. We now have a "testing" subdomain and a "stage" subdomain where "testing" is where untested code can be tested using a separate build of the website. "Stage", of course, mirrors whatever is deployed live and acts as a staging ground for final tests of changes to ensure that they are indeed production ready.
The consultant also set up Trac, which is an open-source wiki, bug tracking package, and project management platform all rolled into one web application. It integrates with the Subversion repository, which the consultant also setup and configured using Dreamhost's web panel.
Dreamhost offers these features as part of the standard hosting package, all for the low cost of $5.95 per month, depending on the length of your committment. Of all of the hosting providers that I've looked at, Dreamhost is the best for new startups looking to establish a web presence using PHP, Perl, Ruby, and some other popular programming languages. You'll never have to worry about running out of databases, as Dreamhost will supply you with an endless supply of MySql databases!
Some of the things that really stood out to me were things like the Jabber Chat server, a full Unix shell, the Debian Linux operating system, and IMAP access so you can download your email to a mail client. There is a one-click install feature for installing many popular packages, such as Wordpress, Moodle, and Joomla. In addition, through the shell you can install other applications, such as Trac!
To make this deal even sweeter, you can get unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth if you sign up now by clicking on the link in the left section on my website! This leaves lots of room for growth, and this perhaps may be the last hosting package you'll ever need!
The only catch, there are only 1111 slots left open for unlimited disk space and bandwidth, so sign up today!
Click here to learn more
One of the newest consultants spent just a small portion of his time in setting up some tools that would not only make development more efficient; but also, these tools will help prevent catastrophic mistakes that oftentimes can occur. Manual, repeated tasks are prone to error, and it's not a matter of if a failure occurs, but when will the failure occur.
The consultant set up several domain names for us to use in the deployment process. Previously, the site was deployed to the server under the www subdomain. While this is fine for code that has been tested on the hosting platform, it's not fine when deploying live. We now have a "testing" subdomain and a "stage" subdomain where "testing" is where untested code can be tested using a separate build of the website. "Stage", of course, mirrors whatever is deployed live and acts as a staging ground for final tests of changes to ensure that they are indeed production ready.
The consultant also set up Trac, which is an open-source wiki, bug tracking package, and project management platform all rolled into one web application. It integrates with the Subversion repository, which the consultant also setup and configured using Dreamhost's web panel.
Dreamhost offers these features as part of the standard hosting package, all for the low cost of $5.95 per month, depending on the length of your committment. Of all of the hosting providers that I've looked at, Dreamhost is the best for new startups looking to establish a web presence using PHP, Perl, Ruby, and some other popular programming languages. You'll never have to worry about running out of databases, as Dreamhost will supply you with an endless supply of MySql databases!
Some of the things that really stood out to me were things like the Jabber Chat server, a full Unix shell, the Debian Linux operating system, and IMAP access so you can download your email to a mail client. There is a one-click install feature for installing many popular packages, such as Wordpress, Moodle, and Joomla. In addition, through the shell you can install other applications, such as Trac!
To make this deal even sweeter, you can get unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth if you sign up now by clicking on the link in the left section on my website! This leaves lots of room for growth, and this perhaps may be the last hosting package you'll ever need!
The only catch, there are only 1111 slots left open for unlimited disk space and bandwidth, so sign up today!
Click here to learn more
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