September 26th, 2019 – Earlier this year, HumRRO acquired The Pittman McLenagan Group (PMG), a firm focused on public safety and related sectors. Gavan O’Shea recently sat down for a short interview with Shane Pittman, PMG’s president for nearly 30 years, to discuss PMG’s history and new opportunities within HumRRO.
Video Transcript
(0:04) Gavan: Hi, I’m Gavan O’Shea and I’m the Manager of HumRRO’s Creative Services Group and I’m here with Shane Pittman – and several months ago, HumRRO acquired The Pittman McLenagan Group (or PMG), where Shane co-led the organization for nearly 30 years. Welcome to HumRRO, Shane!
Shane: Thank you, glad to be here.
(0:22) Gavan: Can you talk a little bit about the type of services that PMG specialized in and some of the clients you’ve worked with?
Shane: PMG, like HumRRO, specialized in custom assessments and we worked with a wide-range of organizations – utilities, transportation, public safety, and other types of organizations – but in the last 5 to 10 years we’ve been focused on the public safety space – police, fire, corrections, sheriff).
For example, we’ve worked with Howard County Fire, City of Suffolk in Virginia – Police and Fire, Prince George’s County – we’ve work with really all the public safety organizations in that county.
We’ve also worked at the state level, with Maryland Natural Resources police, as well as University of Maryland Police.
Thinking about some of our other clients, there’s really been quite a range in terms of those clients. We’ve worked with for example, Amtrak as well as ACLU – and thankfully, we’re still working with quite a number of those clients as we are here at HumRRO.
(1:24) Gavan: How did you decide to join forces with HumRRO?
Shane: Well, Suzanne Tsacoumis and I go way back. When I saw that she had been selected as president of HumRRO, of course, I immediately congratulated her. We decided to have lunch and catch up and the rest is history.
It’s really been what we see as a perfect match: we have very similar approaches – the custom approach, as we’ve already talked about – values, and very similar culture. We saw this as really a natural fit for legacy PMG folks, as well as our clients.
(2:02) Gavan: Excellent. How does the acquisition expand the range of services that HumRRO can offer?
Shane: We believe that we can really help HumRRO move forward in this public safety space, especially at the state and local level. As well, we have some techniques we use – video-based assessments – that really work well in the high-stakes public safety assessment arena, as well as increasing diversity because of the types of techniques that we use. So, of course the other side of it is, it’s really nice that on both sides of the table to have experience, discussing new ideas, and new approaches, because we all end up in a better place.
(2:49) Gavan: Well, we are extremely happy to have you here and I want to extend a very warm welcome to you and the rest of the PMG team.
Shane: Thank you.
