Over 70% of important business initiatives exceed their deadlines and these delays can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per day. Half of business projects with large technology components cost three times their original estimates due to missed deadlines. And nearly one in five projects gets canceled entirely.

Why? Large organizational projects are different from the initiatives for which the traditional project management approach was designed. Yet, most organizations and consulting firms still use these century-old methods built upon Fredrick Taylor’s “scientific management” developed for mass production. We are clearly no longer in the Industrial Age, and compete in the era driven by what management legend Peter Drucker termed “knowledge work.” This requires a better approach—to get work done with higher quality, greater speed, and at a lower cost.

For example, in large enterprise technology projects, there are multiple and interdependent stakeholders. They often include the CEO and executive management team; the Board of Directors; the company’s project director, an outside software supplier, and an outside systems integrator. The conventional project approach fails so often because it has trouble managing major organizational disconnects within and between these five major players.

Technology is not usually the problem. Organizational interdependencies that can’t be managed well via complex committee structures is often the issue.