Improving productivity, planning and reporting is the goal of many organisations in today's cut-throat world. New IT implementations can greatly assist with these objectives, but one important factor that mustn't be overlooked is ensuring the project continues to support employee communications or inter-personal relationships.

Why is team cooperation so often difficult to achieve? Sometimes it's because people hide information when things are going wrong, or feel 'knowledge is power' and are reluctant to share it. In other instances individuals prefer to impose their own ideas rather than listening to someone else's opinion. However, the one of the main reasons cooperation fails is because team members, including the leader, focus on telling each other what to do rather than letting people find their own solutions.

We seem to face more complex problems as each year progresses. Amongst other things, today we are confronted by the European Community economic crises, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the ongoing issues of climate change. The key point is that none of these problems can be solved by any one person or set of people alone. Cooperation is the way to resolve these issues by finding the answers as a team.