I am currently in my grad program in CS, and I am interested in studying software engineering processes, project management, and metrics in a PhD program.
Can I ask here or on the main Academia site which universities are currently focused on researching the areas in which I am interested?
That's not really the point of Academia.SE. The goal of this board is to collect questions and advice on problems related to all of academia, not just tools that can benefit one discipline, or especially one subdiscipline.
The general rule about what should go on the board is to ask: "can the answer to this question help someone who is in a different department at a different school?" If yes, then it's appropriate for the board. If not, it probably won't work.
I agree with @aeismail regarding the subdiscipline, as those are very localized, but I'm wondering whether we should relax this for broad disciplines (i.e. mathematics, history, political science, etc). Note that we already allow questions specific to a single location; many approve of that, with no negative feedback on that at all. On the other hand, we have also agreed that university-specific questions are too specific (I couldn't find a link for that one, but that's how we tend to vote). I don't see how disciplines are different from locations in that respect.
As an example, this question was flagged as off-topic. While I agree it's argumentative, using the above argument it's sufficiently broad to be relevant to many users, and with a simple edit it could be quite useful.
