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.

The Camel is a Horse Designed by Committee

The French shipbuilders produced a curious quartet of battleships over the course of twelve years in the late nineteenth century - the Hoche and her sisters Marceau, Magenta and Neptune. It has been argued by some naval historians that because of the accumulation of various features, bits and pieces demanded by multiple departments, they eventually lost any resemblance to battleships.

A foreign critic described one of the ships as "a half-submerged whale with a number of laborer's cottages built on its back." A domestic columnist, while being understandably more sympathetic, referred to her as "Le Grand Hotel."

Any study on project failure will list poor stakeholder communication as one of the top three reasons for a project's demise. This brief case study discusses the steps I took to revive project stakeholder communications and move a group of stakeholders from intense distrust to frequent (and pleasant) collaboration.

Background: This web application redesign project for the military had petered to a low level grind, characterized by tersely worded emails, accusations and entrenched opinions. Project status meetings were held monthly, and sometimes skipped. There were no other recurring communications.Following please find key steps I used to shift this group to collaboration.