Articles

If
by Rudyard Kipling
For some inspiration, this poem may help you through difficult times.  This has become the "project poem" for several challenging projects I have worked on!

Creativity is Abundant - Help People Find It And All Will Benefit
by Mike Cooper
Leaders need to nurture creativity in their organization - it exists more often than people may think.

The Project Manager and Their Interaction with Other Critical Organization Functions
by Mike Cooper
The role of the project manager is critical to the success of anything but the most trivial sized projects.  And yet the project manager cannot “do it all”.  There are many others involved in the success of projects.  This article is an introduction to this series.

The Project Manager and Their Interaction with the Finance Organization
by Mike Cooper
What does the finance department expect from project managers?  What should project managers be expecting from the finance department?  How should these organizations work together for the common good of the organization?  This article explores these questions.

Selling Services - Coordinating Sales and Project Management
by Mike Cooper and Frank Winters, first published in Proceedings of the Project Management Institute Annual Seminars & Symposium September 7-16, 2000 Houston, Texas, USA
Presented at the PMI 2000 Symposium, and forming the basis for the process diagram in the Tools section of our website, this paper considers pitfalls that IT vendor companies often fall into when selling services.  The focus is on the interaction between the vendor's sales team and their project / program management team during the sales cycle.

Conflicting priorities between product and project management in a combined product / services organization
by Mike Cooper, first published in the Project Management Institute's Information Systems SIG Newsletter, Sept 1999
There are many computer software businesses that consist of a core product in which each sale results in enhancements to the core product together with a services component that is unique to the client. This can often lead to conflicts between the provision of the solution to the client and the ongoing development of the core product.

Contingency When Proposing IT Service Projects - The Supplier's Viewpoint 
by Mike Cooper, first published in Proceedings of the Project Management Institute Annual Seminars & Symposium October 3-10, 2002, San Antonio, Texas, USA
Presented at the PMI 2002 Symposium, this paper considers some of the supplier’s challenges when assessing project contingency for service projects that have a large component of human resources for their completion. The interaction between contingency from the supplier’s perspective and contingency from the customer’s perspective is considered.