Enterprise Project Management, in broad terms, is the field of organizational development that supports organizations in managing integrally and adapting themselves to the changes of a transformation. Enterprise Project Management is a way of thinking, communicating and working, supported by an information system, that organizes enterprise's resources in a direct relationship to the leadership's vision and the mission, strategy, goals and objectives that move the organization forward. Simply put, EPM provides a 360 degree view of the organization's collective efforts.
In recent years, with general adoption of (IT) governance practices, Enterprise Project Management has become more specific: whereas in the 1990s focus was generally on the management of the single project, in the subsequent decade, the focus lay more on the fact that a project is likely to be not the only one in the enterprise. The project co-exists with many other projects in the enterprise, or may be part of one or more programs. It may utilize (human) resources that are shared among other projects.
In order to facilitate governance, it has become essential to be able to manage, monitor, and assess the status of all projects (and other assets, of course) in the enterprise, through a set of (preferably uniform) Enterprise Project Management processes, methods and application packages. Typically, organizations that adopt an Enterprise Project Management way of working, might set up a Project Management Office (PMO)/ Enterprise Project Management Office (EPMO), which is said to be more successful than a traditional PMO in addressing the priorities of the organization as its scope is enterprise-wide), might select and adopt a Project Management Methodology like PRINCE2, PMBOK (or create a proprietary method) or follow the concepts of IPMA Competence Baseline as a foundation for development and certification of project managers and their knowledge, experience and behaviour. They might even select and implement a software system to support Enterprise Project Management.