November 1, 1999

Jack Cooper: Project-Management Skills Are Critical
By Ram Charan

"It's not a win to install new technology," says Jack Cooper, CIO of Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., a $18.3 billion maker of pharmaceuticals and personal-care products. "It's a win when IT delivers value to the company."

To do that, he says, CIOs need to have not just an understanding of technology and the company's business priorities and have the ability to communicate with the IT staff and business mangers; CIOs must also have impeccable project-management skills.

"The CIO's job is different from any other job in the company," he says. "Instead of doing consistent transactions day in and day out, technology is bringing new systems in all the time. You're managing change all the time. You have to know how commit resources and set deadlines and know when perfect is too costly."

Cooper points out that most jobs offer the luxury of doing the same task over and over. If you change a process, you do a pilot, then implement it in department after department. "With IT, you're only allowed to do it once," he says. "Most of the things we do, we won't revisit for seven or eight years. That makes it a lot tougher to get it right."

As IT has grown in importance, so has the need to get it right the first time. Cooper says that typical projects five years ago might have cost a big company several hundred thousand dollars. Today, it's not uncommon for implementations to cost $10 million.

The size and complexity of IT projects these days also means the CIO can't run every project personally. He or she must develop project-management skills in everyone in the IT department. "They have to be instilled in the fiber in everyone who is assigned to a project," he says.

There are myriad training courses that can teach people the basics of project management, such as setting target dates for completing each stage of the project and defining a key set of deliverables. The CIO's job, according to Cooper, is to motivate. "It's easy to have a reason why the project won't meet its current obligation," he says. "You have to get past those to succeed. The desire to win and to create solutions in the face of adversity-that has to be promoted, encouraged, and worked on all the time."

return to main story, "How To Survive As A CIO"

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