Lately most execs have been focused on making sure their AI projects pay off.
With good reason: The rate of failure for AI initiatives has been notoriously high.
But AI projects aren’t the only ones that need attention. In fact, CIOs and their executive colleagues should be putting that kind of focus into all IT projects, given that success on more conventional initiatives — from new software deployments to ERP implementations — is far from perfect.
Statistics vary. Some often-quoted reports about IT project failure rates of 70% date back several years, making them unreliable reflections of the landscape today. But project consultants say a good percentage of IT projects still fail, with estimates ranging from about a third to as much as high as that 70% mark.
In the Project Management Institute’s 2026 Pulse of the Profession report, researchers report that 31% of complex projects fail to achieve the full scope of their originally intended benefits.
CIOs, project leaders, researchers, and IT consultants generally define failure for an IT project as not delivering expected benefits within the expected timeframe. Failure can also mean a project doesn’t produce returns, runs so late as to be obsolete when completed, or doesn’t engage users who then shun it in response.
Why do IT projects continue to fail? Here are 12 common culprits.
1. Lack of project management expertise
Expensive and highly visible projects get the benefit of being led by professional project managers, but small and midsize projects often don’t, says Eric Bloom, executive director of the IT Management and Leadership Institute.
So those small and midsize projects are assigned to someone like a business analyst without any true training, he says. Those workers typically don’t have the expertise or experience necessary to succeed in the project manager role, nor are they given enough time to learn what it takes to manage a project or to complete the extra project management tasks.
CIOs would see higher success rates if more projects have trained project managers, Bloom says. They’re better able to corral and schedule resources, coordinate staff schedules, and get everyone moving in the same direction — and do so across multiple projects. They’re also more capable of implementing the governance needed to keep projects on target to deliver what’s expected and not let scope creep run up costs and schedules without adding additional value.
2. No alignment with business objectives
Some projects still fail because IT teams and business teams aren’t on the same page about the organization wants to achieve. The result is misalignment between the project objectives and business goals, says Shane McDaniel, CIO for the City of Seguin, Texas, and a Project Management Professional.
That’s both avoidable and fixable with communication. CIOs, their project leaders, and even team members need to cultivate strong relationships and engage in ongoing conversations where “they have the ability to raise their hand and say, ‘We have to get our heads together,’” McDaniel says.
“It boils down to communication, awareness, being proactive, and holding people accountable,” he adds. “There is a whole ecosystem around it to make that investment worthwhile.”
3. Ambiguity around measures of success
It’s impossible to succeed if success is undefined, yet executives continue to launch projects without articulating clear, concrete metrics to meet, says George Reed, CIO at auntEDNA.ai and a Project Management Professional.
Project owners must think about their future state, Reed says. “They need to ask, ‘If we were already done, what does winning look like?’”
Then project teams can determine milestones, leading indicators, and metrics to evaluate their progress and their final product. “[Project teams] need to know what needs to be true and what are the tangible benefits they need to deliver. No project should be approved if you don’t have targets for measurable results,” Reed adds.
4. Not enough scrutiny of AI outputs
Project managers and IT teams are using AI to help with scoping, scheduling, and myriad other tasks. The technology helps them move forward fast, but maybe not more accurately or as precisely as if they had done the work themselves.
That can be a problem for project success, says Te Wu, CEO and chief project officer at PMO Advisory.
“If you use AI, you get something quickly and it may look good, but the problem with AI is it can make stuff up,” Wu says.
AI tools may not introduce big errors; it might just have minor mistakes or misalignments, he explains. But if AI creates lots of those that are riddled throughout the project, then they add up and can tank the whole initiative.
“So, you have to have a sharper eye to spot issues; the reviewer has to be super diligent in reviewing it,” Wu warns.
5. Failing to work at the pace of AI
Wu has spotted another problem when project leaders bring AI into the process: It works way faster than the humans on the team.
That’s a benefit in many ways, Wu says. But as AI speeds through tasks, humans still need to run with the outputs. And if there aren’t enough people assigned at that point, work can pile up and projects fall behind schedule or need more staff than anticipated to keep up.
Wu advises project managers to adjust processes to accommodate the speed that AI introduces to avoid bottlenecks.
“This is just the reality, that we humans are too slow to review all the AI,” Wu says. “You can certainly use AI to accelerate IT project delivery, but project managers can’t then treat IT projects in the traditional ways.”
6. Mismatch between assigned resources and planned projects
There’s a long history of projects failing due to a lack of needed resources, as projects suffer delays or quality issues if the right experts aren’t available at the right time to tackle the needed work.
That under-resourcing continues to plague IT projects, says Noah Fletcher, a partner in the operations excellence practice at consultancy West Monroe.
Moreover, AI may be making the problem worse. Yes, project teams can use AI to speed through certain tasks, such as coding, and the project leaders can use AI to reduce the number of people required to handle those tasks. But business and IT execs often overestimate the time and resource savings that AI brings to a project and as a result ask for faster project delivery while assigning fewer resources. In other words, Fletcher says, people are being asked to do more with less — and often too much more with too much less.
Many organizations can indeed reduce the time and people they’re assigning to projects, Fletcher says, but they must train project teams on how to optimize their use of AI tools. Even with fully trained teams capable of optimizing their use of AI in project delivery, organizational leaders must have realistic expectations about AI’s contribution to a project’s timeline and resource needs.
7. Poor prioritization practices
Unrealistic AI expectations isn’t the only reason project teams end up with more than they can do, Fletcher says. Poor prioritization also plays a role in many organizations.
“They’re not making hard choices on what are the really critical things to drive through,” he says. “They sometimes have to make hard choices about what to push forward, but that whole prioritization governance function is something I frequently see as very ineffective.”
The result is that too many people are working on too many things, with diluted efforts leading to poor business outcomes for multiple projects.
Business and IT execs must work together to prioritize projects based on each project’s anticipated business value and then shepherd projects to completion based on that priority list — “which means cutting out a lot of the lower priorities,” Fletcher says.
8. No business ownership
Even when IT is perfectly aligned with business objectives, a project can still tank when no business leader has accountability, says Eric Stettler, a partner in the digital practice at Kearney, a global strategy and management consulting firm.
A business owner with clear accountability is needed to ensure that business resources are available when required, and that process changes and worker adoption happen, Stettler says. Having CIOs instead of a business owner try to make those happen “would be a tail-wagging-the-dog scenario,” he adds.
“CIOs can make sure the right process ownership is in place, and that leaders are aligned to a common set of objectives, but ultimately the business has to decide whether it’s going to operate differently,” Stettler adds.
9. Lack of business sponsor engagement
Business leader ownership is not enough; the owner also must commit adequate time for involvement and oversight.
Otherwise, they can miss signs that the project is going off track, or they can fail to cultivate enough trust that project leaders feel comfortable escalating issues early enough.
Moreover, if sponsors aren’t actively involved, if they’re just looking at dashboards, and only attending briefings, then all the decision-making is left on the project team who may not have all the information needed to make the best choices, says Lenka Pincot, chief of staff to the CEO at PMI.
“What is really needed is active sponsorship and help,” Pincot says. “You need someone to stand behind the idea, ensure funding for the project in the beginning and then when it’s running, to help navigate the business alignment with other stakeholders.”
There can be more than one sponsor, she adds. And if it’s a business project with an IT component — as practically all are these days, then sponsors should be the CIO and someone from the business.
10. Not involving all stakeholders
IT project manager Krista Phillips recounts one case in which a large multinational corporation implemented a new technology across its companies but caught one division completely unaware of the ongoing implementation work.
Turns out that specific division had been left out of all the planning and project processes.
Phillips acknowledges that project teams don’t usually overlook entire divisions, but they sometimes fail to identify and include all the stakeholders they should in the project process. Consequently, they miss key requirements to include, regulations to consider, and opportunities to capitalize on.
11. Slow or no decision-making mechanisms
Another issue that can put a project at risk: slow or no decision-making mechanisms.
Rick Catalano, partner with AMIGO, which provides project management consulting, training, and software, says many organizations lack a strong decision-making muscle and as a result projects grind to a halt or go off-track.
“Too often there is no one empowered to make decisions, and too often project managers are left waiting for answers and then get asked why things are late,” says Catalano, author of the book The AI Project Manager.
Catalano explains that the executives in charge and the project’s governing board need to have the authority to make decisions and the capacity to make them at a pace that aligns with the project’s timeline. But execs and project sponsors also need to empower project leaders who in turn need to empower those beneath them to make certain decisions, too.
This isn’t a project problem, Catalano says; it’s a cultural one. The C-suite must recognize that delayed or failed IT projects imperil the business and that it is worth their effort to remove roadblocks to success. From there, they need to implement a decision-making matrix, empowering the right people at the right level to make the right decisions, emphasizing the importance of making calls in a timely manner. And project leaders must know how to provide guidance so team members can quickly make informed decisions.
“Build the decision-making into the governance model, so everyone knows exactly who owns what and who is empowered to do what,” Catalano adds.
12. Shortchanging change management
Projects need more than skilled project managers; they also need leaders skilled in change. If projects don’t have skilled change managers and a plan to drive adoption of new technology, they’ll likely fall short of expectations, Fletcher says.
Given how critical technology — and particularly AI — is for business transformation today, “the impact of not having a plan is high right now,” he says. “So leaders need to demand and prioritize change.”
That makes change management particularly important now, he says, as most workers are dealing with so much change they need guidance to absorb it all.
Skilled change managers know how to align incentives to get people to accept new ways of working, and they’re deft at identifying and counteracting obstacles that could hinder adoption of new technologies, says Nick Kramer, a principal for applied solutions at consulting firm SSA & Co. They’re often able to get reluctant workers to get over their hesitations by helping them understand the why behind change.
“Change management is often viewed as just a communications plan, and there’s lip service done to it, but change management is really difficult,” Kramer adds, noting that he has seen more projects fail because of poor change management than poor technology implementations. “To succeed, projects need a CIO or someone else to be an agent of change, they need someone who knows how to drive change.”