One of the people I had pleasure of meeting at DPM 2013 was Carson Pierce. Carson is the Director of Project Management at Yellow Pencil, an end-to-end service provider for web development based in Edmonton and Vancouver. He’s also one of the folks helping the DPM community take root and grow.
Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
PhilaPM March Meetup Recap
 Wednesday Night @HappyCog in Philadelphia…By traditional PM standards, this is an odd question.
Answering it requires admitting there are times when you don’t know what you are doing and are way out of your depth. This is not the way of the traditional PM. If you admit not knowing everything, you demonstrate WEAKNESS and might lose CONTROL. If you have no CONTROL, how can you MANAGE PEOPLE?
By Agile standards, it’s not an odd question. It’s an “it depends” question.
Once the question has been laid down for the room, however, the sharing begins. Several of the PMs around the table offer stories of impossible situations they’ve faced. These aren’t the kind of challenges that can be addressed with a change to a contract or a revised scoping doc. These are the “we had it sorted and then the bottom fell out of the world” problems. The ones you couldn’t have seen coming and which leave you with no good options. These are the problems you give talks about at conferences for the next five years.
RETROPOSTREMORTEMVIEWBLAMESPECTIVEIf you’ve been working in project management for any length of time, you’ve been involved with the meetings that take place at the end of projects. These project reviews or post mortems are generally a wee bit heavy on blame side and a bit light on the learning to improve side. That is, assuming you are actually doing them.If you are working with Agile, hopefully you are doing retrospectives so that your team can get together to explore how to improve how they work together. Retrospectives are one of the best parts of Agile and a great thing for the team… but this is a little different. This meeting, which is hosted by Happy Cog is none of the above. It is, however, one of the more interesting characteristics of this segment of the PM population. Digital PM has been around for a while, but only in the past few years has it begun to identify itself as a somewhat separate group. This meeting is full of PMs from different companies. What they have in common is that in one way or another, they all manage projects that are involved with digital media. Some of their projects are less than a month long. Some last more than a year. Some of their clients demand a traditional approach to managing the work. Some demand an Agile approach. The PMs working in these organizations are generally working with fairly small, design centric teams. Their hybrid model is evolving from needing to be able to work a variety of ways, but being able to fully lock into neither. Their agility is their flexibility and this sharing is part of their approach to continuous improvement. Ten years ago, the project management that existed in this space was simple, basic and practiced by people who were just beginning to cut their teeth. Now it is led by experienced professional project managers and leaders who are schooled up in Agile and waterfall and are collaborating on hybrid tools and techniques that allow them to leverage the best of both. Their pragmatic, collaborative, framework agnostic approach to finding the best way to work with the team and deliver for the client is an exciting and emerging thing. PhilaPM is organized by Brett Harned, Brenna Heaps, Sloan Miller, and Justin Handler. The group has evolved to the point where they are now working developing a new logo, name and website. Until that happens, you can find them here - http://philamade.com/ If you aren’t from Philly, but do work in digital media or if you are just a PM who could use a little inspiration, you may want to check out some of the following… ConferencesDPM2014 http://blog.dpm2013.com/2014/02/24/save-the-date-2014-digital-pm-summit/DPMUK http://www.dpmuk.com/ Groups in the US and CanadaAustin http://www.meetup.com/Digital-PM-Meetup-Austin/Boston http://www.meetup.com/Digital-Project-Management-Boston/ Boulder http://www.meetup.com/Boulder-Web-Project-Managers/ Minneapolis: http://www.meetup.com/Twin-Cities-Interactive-Project-Management-Meetup/ NYC http://dpmconnect.com and http://www.meetup.com/projectmgmt-72/ Philadelphia http://philamade.com Portland: http://pdxdigitalpm.com Vancouver http://www.meetup.com/Vancouver-Digital-Project-Managers/ Groups in EMEALondon, UK http://www.meetup.com/london-digital-project-managers/Manchester, UK http://www.meetup.com/Northern-Digital-PM/ Oslo http://www.meetup.com/Oslo-Digital-Project-Managers/ Groups in ASIAPACMelbourne Digital Project Managers http://www.meetup.com/Melbourne-Digital-Project-Management/Sydney Digital Project Managers http://www.meetup.com/Sydney-Digital-Project-Management/ |
Posted on: March 12, 2014 05:28 PM
| Permalink |
Comments (0)
Sam Barnes has turned to the Dark Side of Digital PM
|
My favorite presentation at DigitalPM2013 was given by Sam Barnes. After years working as a PM in Digital, Sam turned to the DARK SIDE… he became a client. Suddenly, he was taking bids from all the companies he was used to competing against. Given his years of experience leading projects from the agency side of the table, he walked into it thinking it would be a bit of a cake walk. What he found was maybe not so much with the cake … or the walk. In this podcast interview Sam and I talk about his experience being on the client side, his presentation at DigitalPM 2013, the challenges for those working in the Digital PM space who have to be able to work in both waterfall, and Agile, but find that neither really fits as well as one would hope and the upcoming DigitalPM UK conference. If you’d like to learn more about Sam:
He’s got him some blog |
Posted on: December 10, 2013 01:06 PM
| Permalink |
Comments (1)
Digital PM Podcast Interview with Carson Pierce from YellowPencil
|
Carson and I discussed DPM2013, the challenges facing the digital PM community with respect to the Agile vs. traditional question, and the group he has formed of folks in this space who are actively trying to find the collaborate on finding the optimal way to solve the unique each of them faces. You can find the interview here. You can follow Carson on Twitter here. You can find Brett Harned on Twitter here. |
Posted on: December 04, 2013 04:24 AM
| Permalink |
Comments (0)