“It's in progress”: an autopsy of the ghost projects that never land

Every SME has them: projects launched with a fanfare, then waved off with a vague “it's in progress” that lasts for months. Neither dead nor alive, they burn energy and money without ever delivering. The global statistics are damning: around 70 % of projects miss their objectives. But they hide a cheering secret: small projects, for their part, succeed almost 90 % of the time. The whole solution is right there.

You recognise them by a sentence. “The new website? It's in progress.” “The order-process overhaul? We're making headway.” “The reporting tool? Nearly ready.” These ghost projects have haunted the meetings for months, sometimes years. Nobody has really killed them, nobody is really bringing them home. They are the most visible symptom of a company that knows how to launch projects but not how to land them, and they cost far more than their budget, because they tie up teams that could be producing elsewhere.

A global failure rate, unchanged for thirty years

The data from the Standish Group, the global reference on project performance, is conclusive and remarkably stable over time. Around 70 % of projects do not fully reach their initial objectives, only about 31 % are considered fully successful, and the rest are either abandoned or delivered late, over budget, or stripped of promised functions. The PMI, another authority in the field, estimates that 43 % of projects exceed their budget, and that organisations waste on average more than 11 % of their project investment through poor execution. Thirty years of new methods and new tools have barely moved these figures, which tells us that the problem is neither the tooling nor the technology.

The secret of the 30 % that succeed: size

Here is the figure the headline statistic hides, and it changes everything for an SME. A project's success rate depends massively on its size. Small projects, with narrow objectives and small teams, succeed almost 90 % of the time. Very large ones, sprawling and long, succeed less than 10 % of the time. The lesson is counter-intuitive but unanswerable: the best way to make a large project succeed is to cut it into a series of small projects, each delivering a concrete result. An SME is not handicapped by its size, it is advantaged, provided it does not ape the mega-projects of the large groups and instead plays its natural card: the small increment that gets finished fast.

Why projects turn into ghosts

When you look into the causes, three come back every time, and none of them is technical. The first is the absence of a clear objective: a project that nobody can describe precisely, neither what it must produce nor how we will know it is finished, never finishes. The second is the absence of an owner: when everyone is a little responsible, nobody really is, and the project floats. The third is the absence of cadence: without a regular ritual that forces progress and makes blockages visible, the project dissolves into the daily emergencies. The Standish Group has confirmed it since 1994: the leading failure factors are lack of involvement and lack of clear objectives, not technical difficulty.

Landing projects is a job in itself

Steering a project through to delivery is a skill in its own right, distinct from subject-matter expertise. It means framing the expected result and the completion criteria precisely, cutting the work into deliverable milestones, naming a single owner, installing a review cadence that forces decisions, and managing risks before they become crises. Recognised methods such as PRINCE2 structure exactly this discipline, and scale very well to an SME without importing the heaviness. What the leader delegates then is not the decision, it is the mechanics of execution, the part that turns an intention into a delivery.

The real cost is not the budget, it is standing still