Discover how our Enterprise Program and Portfolio Management team partners with clients to drive success through collaboration, alignment, and a people-first approach.
In brief:
The takeaway: Our Enterprise Program and Portfolio Management (EPPM) team is not just another PPM vendor. Instead, we build the right partnerships to deliver the right collaborative solutions using modern tools, streamlined processes, and a people-first mindset.
How do you ensure success?: We embed ourselves in your world, working with your teams to create strategies that drive efficiency, spark innovation, and deliver lasting results.
What are the most important elements of your work?: We help you align your programs and projects with your strategies, resources and culture. All three are important, but we focus especially on culture.
Why is culture so important?: Your norms and goals define what success looks like to you. As EPPM national service offering lead Joyce Meyer-Warren puts it, “Culture trumps even strategy, because cultural misalignment will consistently undermine any strategic plan.”
How do I get started? Keep reading to see how Meyer-Warren and two other members of our EPPM team — national delivery lead Rick Morris and national portfolio management practice lead Craig Horgan — collaborate with Centric team members and clients to find the right PPM solutions.
Meet Our EPPM Leads
“I want to be the client’s first introduction to Centric,” said Meyer-Warren. “It’s about more than just solving problems — it’s about listening, really understanding what’s driving the challenges, and using our industry know-how to help chart a path forward.” 
Meyer-Warren’s previous work as a project manager nourished those partnership and listening skills. Over her over 20-year career in the public and private sectors, she’s worked with the Department of Defense and led major transformation efforts in the healthcare industry, turning around struggling programs and helping organizations become more agile.
“Because of those experiences, I can speak to process and technology, but I love designing solutions,” she said. “There’s something powerful about bringing the right team together and collaborating with clients to create something that truly works for them.”
Morris quickly jumped in to note that the EPPM team cannot do it alone.
“We interact with other Centric service offerings too, especially People and Change,” Morris said. “That way, we can deliver a right-sized approach, whether the client needs a solution or role-based work.”
Horgan added that most Centric employees have some PPM experience, regardless of their primary specialty area.
“I’ve gone into engagements as a program manager, and I’ll have five other Centric team members with me who have EPPM skills,” Horgan said. “As I always say, ‘Anyone in management is always doing portfolio program project management work — but the formal practice is a discipline.’ Our team brings that disciplined approach to the table.”
We Focus on the ‘How’ as Much as the ‘What’
After Meyer-Warren holds her initial conversation, Morris, Horgan, and their EPPM team members can discuss the client’s needs more deeply.
“Each of our national EPPM colleagues brings something unique to the table,” Morris said. “Their mix of skills and perspectives makes our team so effective.”
For example, he pointed out:
- Matt Siglinger, who brings the data that drives the smart decision-making needed to translate insights into action.
- Jayson Castillo, a big-picture thinker who understands the incentives and strategies that help clients navigate change and drive real transformation.
- John Jolley, a relationship builder who knows his clients’ kids as well as he knows their operating models and PPM, change management, and organizational design needs.
- Andy Ruetschle, who recently completed a five-year program with a major electric utility, delivers deep experience and staying power.
“These EPPM team members take pride in understanding what our clients need. We put ourselves in their shoes,” Meyer-Warren said. “We’re not here to jump to conclusions or push a one-size-fits-all solution. What sets us apart is our focus on the how as much as the what.
“Yes, we bring great tools and processes, but our clients remember us for how we show up every day,” she continued. “Clients often tell us, ‘I feel like we can trust you. You’re thinking about us. You have us in mind.’ To me, that’s the sign of a right partner.”
For Morris, being the right partner means focusing on each project’s overall success, rather than just his piece.
“Recently, I had an engagement where I started to notice little risks and holes with some of the other vendors’ work,” he recalled. “We 100 percent stayed in our lane, but we pointed those gaps out to our client. Our willingness to do that built a lot of trust.”
We Align Strategy and Resources
As the team explores each client’s challenges, they use their experience to align their solutions to the client’s strategies, resources and culture.
“Often, clients will have strategic ideas, but not fully formed strategies,” Horgan said. “In those cases, we will help them ‘back into’ their strategies by first identifying the problems they must solve to attain their goals.
“Once we have a better idea of which projects best align with organizational strategies and priorities, we can put mechanisms in place to determine how to tackle them and in what sequence,” he continued.
The next alignment issue is resources — not only financial resources, but also the skills and people needed to execute the projects.
“This is where we start to connect the dots,” Horgan explained. “We know which projects we’d like to do and in what order, but accommodating resource restrictions requires significant coordination.”
Horgan said that work can raise tough questions, like, “Do we cancel this project?” or “How do we reallocate resources to keep this project alive?”
“Those questions can be hard for project leaders to hear,” Horgan said. “But the conversations go a lot better if we have a full understanding of the client’s culture — and if we have their trust that we will work within it, not against it.”
We Align to Culture
As an example of Centric’s approach to culture, Horgan discussed a recent client, a church.
As a PMO advisor, he helped the church leaders build a decision model to determine priorities, establish the sequence of projects, and identify tools and software for them. His work reduced employees’ stress and decreased their workloads, but it took some extra effort to remain aligned with the culture.
“Because the church loved its culture, I had to think more creatively,” he said. “No two solutions are ever the same.”
While he agreed with Horgan that solutions are always unique, Morris noted underlying problems are often very similar. He said he often tells clients they are “predictably unique.”
“Maybe your portfolio is struggling because you have too many projects and not enough people. Or you’re not good at prioritizing or measuring progress. Maybe you’re holding ‘lessons learned’ sessions but not applying those lessons to future projects,” he said.
“Whatever the case, we have ways of fixing those issues that have worked for hundreds of clients,” continued Morris, an internationally known writer and speaker who has completed over 150 PPM/Agile software implementations.
“Your problems are unique, but you’re ‘predictable’ because we know the issues that got you to where you are, and we know how to solve them,” Morris concluded.
Our EPPM Team is the Right Team for Centric, Too
As proud as Meyer-Warren is of how her team works with clients, she’s equally proud that EPPM at Centric has become the right team for other Centric employees.
“Beyond our client work, we support Centric’s local geographies in several delivery management roles — project and program managers, scrum masters, agile DevOps coaches, and product managers,” Meyer-Warren said.
“We almost function like a center of excellence,” she continued. “Our colleagues at Centric ask us, ‘Hey, what’s the market research saying about this?’ or ‘Can you help with a technical problem?’ And we can, because we have the right business consulting and technical experts to help.”
For Morris, another important role Centric EPPM plays is elevating his profession’s status.
“The best project managers help clients plan forward instead of reporting the past,” he said. “We’re not just here to deliver tools or checkboxes — we’re here to make a real difference. When we are seen in a more strategic role, rather than glorified event planners and report generators, we can have massive impacts for our clients.”
Added Horgan, “We listen. We adapt. We care. And we build solutions that last — because we know that’s what the right kind of partnership looks like.”
Learn how to assess your organization’s aptitude for selecting the highest impact projects that maximize value return and optimize resource utilization. Read our white paper.
Establishing or reevaluating your PMO so your project prioritization is just right can be a tricky business. Our Enterprise Portfolio and Program Management experts will happily work with you to determine your organization’s next steps for moving forward. Let’s Talk
