Many, if not most, of the big "reinvention" projects that large organization undertake fail, and they fail because they were designed to, according to Jack Bergstrand, former CIO of The Coca-Cola Co. and founder of Brand Velocity. The problem begins with management methods that were created for the industrial age, which fail to consider complex human factors in large, dynamic organizations.

"Traditional project management, with its emphasis on numbers, objectivity, and static pre-planning, works well when you are building a bridge or an assembly line. It fails 70 percent of the time when working with people," Bergstrand writes in a column at CIOUpdate.

The way to avoid this built-in failure factor is to come up with new project management methods, which have more to do with social sciences than physical sciences, Bergstrand advises. Steps toward improved project management include switching from a fragmented specialization perspective to a more holistic vision, and moving away from a static planning process to an action-oriented planning process.

"Even though planning is critical, there is probably no area where there is more wasted effort in major enterprise projects than in the planning area," he writes. "[I]n the industrial age, planning was hugely important because the plan directly drove how assets such as machines, assembly lines, and buildings were constructed...Time consuming and precisely engineered plans put together in a laboratory-like environment invariably crumble when they come in contact with the ongoing human dynamics during execution."

For more:
- see Jack Bergstrand's column at CIOUpdate

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