"How do you pronounce 'EPM'?" I asked one of our consultants recently.

"Enterprise Project Management?" he replied.

"No," I said. "You pronounce it P-M-O."

Project managers that can create strong, collaborative work environments will achieve more significant project results – be that time, scope or budget. Today’s PM has a role beyond project deliverables; your role is also to get, keep and grow your team members. To do so, it is critical to understand your employee groups; who they are, how they differ from one another and what they expect from you as a project manager. PMs need to create an engaged relationship with all team members to achieve a win-win outcome for the team members and the project stakeholder.

Lack of loyalty is a serious problem in organizations everywhere today.

No longer do people join a company and devote the rest of their working lives to it.   Companies are, of course, not exactly known for offering up thirty or forty years of employment, a gold watch and pension plan.

Times have changed.  Businesses appear and disappear at a dizzying pace. So do the jobs they offer. People no longer expect to spend their entire career with the same company.

Organizations preoccupied with short-term, bottom line thinking often view their employees as little more than resources to be hired, fired, and manipulated as the need arises.

Any journey worth taking has a destination as its end goal. From an organizational perspective, the destination is to fulfill enterprise value. Enterprise value can take different forms. For commercial entities, it’s typically profitability and for government organizations, it’s delivering services. For almost every organization, though, there exists not one single destination, but rather many interim points along a continuous journey.

There is a lot of resistance in the agile community against project management.  Many (though not all) proponents of agile methods feel that project management is the root of all evils.  To understand this perspective, we need to look at how agile methods were evangelized in their early days.