Why 70% of digitalisation projects fail (and how to avoid it)

70% of digital transformation projects don't achieve the expected results: a figure cited for years by McKinsey, Gartner and several other studies. Yet companies keep launching into digitalisation projects with the same optimistic expectations and, often, the same mistakes. Working with Italian SMEs for years, the difference between projects that work and those that stall almost never lies in the chosen technology: it lies in three much more mundane mistakes, which recur with impressive consistency.

Mistake 1: buying the solution before understanding the problem

The pattern is always the same: a convincing demo, a signed contract, and then during implementation you discover that the product covers 80% of the cases but not the 20% most critical for that company, or that the real problem was organisational and no software solves it on its own. A manufacturing company we work with had bought a new ERP to "solve production problems": after 18 months the ERP was operational but the problems remained, because the real bottleneck was in production-capacity planning, a process never properly mapped before implementation.

Mistake 2: underestimating organisational change

Every new tool requires people to change how they work, but in Italian SMEs change management is almost always treated as a detail: a few hours of training, a manual, and off we go. The typical result is a system adopted only formally, with the old "temporary" tool still in use months later. Projects that work treat organisational change with the same seriousness as the technology: they involve the team from the start, explain the why before the how, and define an adoption plan with verifiable milestones.

Mistake 3: trying to do everything at once

"We want to digitalise operations, CRM, document management and internal communication, all by the end of the year": every time we hear this sentence, we know the project is already at risk. The successful digital transformations we've supported almost always start from a specific problem, solve it well, measure the results, and only then expand. A project that delivers a measurable result in 60 days creates the organisational momentum for the next step.

What sets apart the projects that work

A well-defined problem before choosing the solution, an adoption plan that includes people and not just technology, and an incremental approach with results measured at each milestone. It's not a magic formula, but it's an effective antidote to the three most common mistakes.