top LinkedIn groups for project managers

3 Top Responsive LinkedIn Groups for Project Managers

The main advantage LinkedIn groups for project managers give to you as a member is the opportunity to reach out to a community of people that share the same interests. There should be a limited number of things you can do in a group, varying from discussions to posts about job search and opportunities within your expertise. Unfortunately, if not moderated properly, such networks usually become direct victims of marketing and advertising that makes truly relevant content lost in the feed.

From my experience as a member in nearly 50 project management groups on LinkedIn, I must admit that very few of them show any signs of response and engagement. What grabbed my attention to this topic was a post by a Senior Project and Programme Manager and a famous influencer in the project management domain, Marc Hammoud. “Most stuff published today on LinkedIn ranges from barely hidden marketing to naked promotion, and sometimes it goes down the spiral of outrageous straight spam!” admits Hammoud. It appears that a project management community with more than 800,000 members is now a mismanaged and spammy hodgepodge that is more an advertising platform than a #1 Group for Project Managers. Sad, but true.

top responsive LinkedIn groups for project managers

But to help you filter out the spam from the most responsive project management groups on LinkedIn, I created this short list of options you can go for if you want to talk to project management professionals, ask for advice, present yourself, and what’s most important, be heard.

PMI Project, Program and Portfolio Management: #1 group for career advancement

As an official LinkedIn group of the Project Management Institute, it probably has the most active and incredibly responsive community of project managers on LinkedIn, consisting of more than 200,000 members. Its administrators carefully filter out off-topic posts and feature relevant news for project managers. As indicated in the description, this project management group welcomes both PMO leaders and new project managers, experienced project, program or portfolio managers, business analysts, or just anyone who works in a project-oriented profession.

If you’re doing research on a project management topic, preparing for a PMP exam, or simply looking for the answers to your questions, this community of project experts is always out there and eager to help. While investigating what project managers were reading in 2018, I received more than 50 comments with book suggestions from the PMI community.

top responsive LinkedIn groups for project managers

Agile and Lean Software Development

Agile and Lean Software Development group is a highly responsive network of project managers practicing Agile. It has more than 145,000 members. What makes it a goldmine for Agile practitioners is loyalty to project management topics and strict content moderation. It’s the only group that personally informed me about the violation of their rules when I tried to give a link to my article there. As a trusted source of advice for project managers, this PM network offers various discussions on Agile topics. For example,

  • What is Agile all about? Is it a framework or methodology or tool?
  • When you talk or write, do you distinguish between “agile” (lowercase) and “Agile” (uppercase)?  If so, how do you distinguish between them? Why?
  • Which participants make agile change and the associated self-organisation and self-responsibility more difficult?

Before publishing or distributing anything to this group, I highly recommend to learn its rules first.

I want to be a PMP®

The group’s name speaks for itself. As stated in the description, it is the largest and most active PMP® study group in the world. It was designed to create a virtual space for PMP candidates, credential holders and experts who join for PMP exam preparation. Often, people would go there to share their PMP exam preparation tips or ask for help regarding easy PDU collection to maintain the status. From my observations, despite spam that sometimes occurs in this group, it’s still a network of PM professionals glad to congratulate you with passing your PMP® or share their recommendations.

Also, be sure to check out these good old sources of inspiration for project managers.

So far, only these three project management groups deserve to be mentioned here as they show the highest level of engagement I noticed.

Anything missing? Leave your suggestions in the comments below and subscribe to get the news straight to your mailbox.


Illustration: Copyright © Irena Voilenko



1 Comment

Join the discussion and tell us your opinion.

Marc Hammoudreply
December 30, 2018 at 11:26 PM

Iryna, Thank you for an amazing read. I literally enjoyed every line of it. You are absolutely right: a lot of what is published today on LinkedIn (and other social networks) is either spam, or one of its siblings…. Thank you for those 3 recommendations. The only addition I’d make here is that those 3 groups are rather niches: PMI, Software Dev and PMP. We all need a more generic group where all PM issues go, be it PMP or other methodologies. Yes, you got me well: Why don’t you start one such group and moderate it properly? I’d be happy to contribute…

Leave a reply