I had a mild to moderate stammer when I was younger and it blighted my childhood. My parents couldn't afford speech therapy so I just had to put up with it. As a result, I developed a coping strategy by replacing the words I had difficulty pronouncing, with similarly meaning alternatives. I recently found out that this is called "covert stammering". I've been masking my stammer in this way for so long that it's second nature now.
It works - to a degree - and even increased my vocabulary, however, the replacement words don't always fit well within the sentence, which sometimes makes my communication style too idiosyncratic.
How do you cope with your stammer? Have you always had one or do you think it's just stress\work-related? How do your colleagues react to it? If they are negative, they'll make it worse.
Stressful situations do tend to make a stammer more pronounced, particularly if it is constantly on your mind when trying to communicate.
