IT Projects in 2025: Why Success Remains the Exception and Coaching Emerges as the Game-Changer

For decades, the allure of IT projects has promised transformation, competitive advantage, and digital reinvention. Yet, as we round the corner into 2025, a sobering truth confronts even the most tech-savvy executives: despite unprecedented investment and advancements, the overwhelming majority of IT projects continue to falter—delivering spiraling costs, botched timelines, and unrealized benefits. How can organizations shift this stubborn paradigm? The answer lies not in more software or smarter AI, but in the often-overlooked human levers of coaching, structured practices, and agile adaptability. This exposé delves deep into the numbers, stories, and strategies shaping IT’s high-stakes landscape, revealing why the future of digital success is as much about people as it is about technology.

The Stark Reality: IT Project Success Remains Elusive

The numbers don’t lie: Despite multi-billion-dollar investments, only 0.5% of IT projects in 2025 meet all three critical success criteria—on budget, on time, and delivering intended benefits. This means just one in every 200 IT endeavors can be called a true success story. As reported by Mosaic and Runn, the remaining projects flounder despite robust methodologies and sophisticated tools.

Financial implications are staggering: Failed projects average a 75% budget overrun, with schedule delays of 46% and value shortfalls of 39%. For large-scale initiatives (budgets over $15 million), the situation worsens: costs balloon by 45%, delivery slips by 7%, and business value drops by 56%. One out of six projects even experiences a catastrophic 200% overrun, with rare extremes reaching 700% beyond budget. These numbers are not isolated outliers—they are endemic to the IT ecosystem.

Public sector projects are even riskier. Government initiatives run an 81% risk of schedule overrun, triple the average cost overruns of their private-sector counterparts. As timelines stretch, risk compounds—each added project year brings a 15% increase in overruns, underscoring the urgency for decisive, informed action.

Root Causes: Beyond Tools and Technology

Software’s promise remains unfulfilled on its own. Seventy-seven percent of high-performing projects leverage project management software, reporting a 27% higher success rate through better visibility and collaboration. Still, 42% of businesses don’t track critical skills, and over half rely on spreadsheets—leaving teams mismatched and under-resourced. More tools are adopted year after year, but they do little for the 71% of companies who admit their employees lack core project skills (ProProfs).

Collaboration gaps drag productivity. Employee surveys reveal that 70% blame ineffective collaboration tools for productivity deficits, while 53% struggle with hybrid work arrangements. The impact? A talent pool ill-equipped for rapid transformation—even the most sophisticated software can’t solve foundational issues around skill, soft skills, and communication.

AI powers a new frontier but brings its own pitfalls. AI integration shows promise, with organizations experiencing 25% higher project success rates and productivity gains of 20%. The vast majority of managers (85%) believe AI can improve delivery. However, an astonishing 95% of companies report zero ROI from generative AI initiatives, despite pouring $30–40 billion into these efforts last year. The lesson: without human-centric strategies, even the most advanced technology investments may fail to deliver (monday.com).

Agile, Hybrid, and the Methodology Revolution

Agile isn’t a silver bullet, but it’s a step ahead. IT departments piloting Agile project management report a 64% success rate, a significant leap over the 49% who rely solely on traditional Waterfall methods. The edge comes from Agile’s flexible approach to evolving requirements and iterative collaboration, now used or piloted by 50% of IT teams (The Digital Project Manager).

Hybrid models unlock greater resilience. The convergence of Agile and predictive elements into hybrid approaches further elevates project outcomes. These models offer the best of both worlds—rigor and adaptability—helping teams respond swiftly to risks and market shifts.

Decision speed is a force multiplier. According to the Standish Group’s CHAOS report, teams with high “decision latency”—that is, those able to make fast, informed choices—achieve 63% success rates, compared to just 18% for their slower counterparts. Structured practices make projects up to 2.5 times more likely to succeed than ad hoc efforts. Such data reframes the conversation: it’s not just about methodology, but the culture of decision-making that amplifies or undermines outcomes.

The Human Factor: Skills, Communication, and the Roots of Failure

Skills gaps are IT’s Achilles’ heel. While 71% of organizations acknowledge critical project skill deficits among staff, only 45% offer accredited training to close the gap. “Power skills”—soft skills like communication, critical thinking, and stakeholder engagement—are now recognized as pivotal. Firms prioritizing these see 72% project success rates, lose just 17% of budgets to failure, and experience less scope creep.

Communication is the silent killer (or enabler). A startling 80% of project failures are attributed, at their core, to poor communication. Conversely, organizations championing robust communication report productivity gains of 25% and twice the employee motivation—especially when teams understand what “success” looks like. For hybrid and remote teams (now 73.8% of the workforce), communication lapses are especially damaging.

Business acumen is rare yet transformative. Only 18% of professionals excel in business acumen, but those who do achieve 27% lower failure rates and are more likely to hit performance targets.

Coaching as Strategic Imperative: Bridging the Human Gap

Coaching changes the odds. As more organizations hit the wall with purely technological or process interventions, coaching has exploded in demand—projected to be a $5.34 billion global market in 2025 (Institute of Project Management). Why? Because coaching directly addresses the core deficits threatening IT project success: skills, confidence, business acumen, and the speed of decision-making.

Data backs coaching’s impact. High-acumen professionals—often cultivated via robust coaching—are associated with a 27% drop in project failure rates and a 5% boost in goal attainment. When organizations integrate coaching and power-skills training, project success rates jump to 72%, and budget loss to failures plummets by 8%. Coaching is the lever that transforms methodology and tools into sustained advantage.

A holistic, people-first strategy outperforms incremental tweaks. Rather than rely on isolated interventions, the most forward-thinking companies are combining coaching with Agile adoption, AI augmentation, and continuous measurement. This synergy delivers productivity gains greater than the sum of its parts: 25% from enhanced communication, 20% from AI, and up to 2.5x uplift from structured practice and decision excellence.

Comparative Perspectives: Old Guard vs. Next-Gen IT Leadership

Legacy mindsets focus on tools and process, believing that more advanced software or stricter governance alone will turn the tide. These leaders may tout investment in project management platforms, but often overlook the human factors that repeatedly sabotage outcomes—underutilized talent, slow decisions, and misaligned communication.

Next-generation leaders prioritize people-centric strategy. They recognize that digital transformation is as much a social and behavioral challenge as a technical one. For these leaders, structured coaching and power-skills development are non-negotiables, not afterthoughts. They audit success rates against market benchmarks (targeting the 0.5% “triple win” rate), embrace hybrid methodologies, and invest in acumen at every level—from frontline staff to the C-suite.

The result? Next-gen organizations close the gap between intent and execution, dramatically outpacing their peers in success rates, budget fidelity, and business value realization. As AI and automation further reshape IT’s landscape, the ability to adapt, learn, and collaborate at speed becomes the defining competitive edge.

“By 2030, the organizations that master coaching, agile adaptation, and AI augmentation—not just technological deployment—will be the only ones left standing. In the digital future, it’s not the tools or the biggest budgets that win, but the fastest learners.”

Practical Steps: Turning the Tide from Failure to Sustainable Success

1. Audit and Benchmark: Start with brutal honesty. Measure your current IT project success rate against the industry’s 0.5% triple-win baseline. Use this as a catalyst for candid boardroom conversations.

2. Mandate Modern Methodologies: Institutionalize Agile and hybrid methods, aiming for a minimum 64% success rate. Don’t just train half your teams—make iterative delivery and adaptability a universal expectation.

3. Deploy Tools with Purpose: Adopt project management and AI platforms strategically, ensuring they’re paired with skills tracking and targeted upskilling. Avoid the skills gap trap that hobbles 42% of businesses.

4. Invest in Systematic Coaching: Move beyond ad hoc training. Commit budget to accredited, outcome-focused coaching programs that build power skills, business acumen, and fast decision-making capacity. Target a 27% failure reduction and 8% budget savings.

5. Elevate Communication and Collaboration: Diagnose and close collaboration gaps, especially in hybrid and remote contexts. Make “communication health” a core project KPI.

6. Rigorously Measure ROI: Especially for emerging technologies like AI, apply disciplined value tracking to avoid the 95% ROI wastage seen with GenAI investments.

Conclusion: Rewriting the Playbook for IT Project Success

The data is both a warning and a compass. Against a backdrop where only a sliver of IT projects achieve true success, the status quo—more tools, stricter processes, or better incentives—simply isn’t enough. The future belongs to organizations that radically rethink their approach, centering not just on technology, but on human development, decisive leadership, and a culture of relentless coaching.

Our perspective is unequivocal: In the next wave of digital transformation, the winners will be those who make people—not platforms—the core of their IT strategy. Coaching is not a “nice to have,” but the cornerstone of resilience, agility, and value delivery. The competitive edge will go to those who cultivate business acumen, prioritize soft skills, and close execution gaps faster than the market can change.

For business leaders, the implication is clear: the time to act is now. Audit, invest, and recalibrate your IT project playbook—with coaching at the center—or risk becoming another cautionary statistic in the annals of digital transformation. The era of the 0.5% project success rate can—and must—end here.