The deadly culprit derailing your projects and costing you millions

Projects are failing. They’re failing a lot more than you realise as well. Sure, you’ve got a great project team and things seem fine. But a lot of executives are surprised to learn how often projects run into trouble. Roughly one in three projects fails to meet its goals, and almost half end up being over budget or late. These failures aren’t just minor challenges, they can amount to millions in losses and missed opportunities. For example, the Delivery Confidence Assessment for the UK Government Major Projects Portfolio published in January 2025 showed 84% of projects in the red or amber category, and around £96bn of whole life costs associated with projects rated red.

So how come lots of the C-suite just don’t see it coming? There’s a bit of a disconnect as problems brew under the surface, unnoticed until it’s too late. If you’ve ever had a project derail out of nowhere, you know how blindsiding in can be. What went wrong? Far too often, it’s the absence of robust project assurance.

The importance of project assurance for on time delivery

One of the reasons why so many project veer off course is a lack of proper project assurance. Project assurance is essentially an independent, critical, objective review of a project’s health. Think of it kind of like a project ‘audit’ but the key difference is that assurance gives you and your decision-makers confidence that projects are set up for success. It involves verifying that the project’s plans, risks and execution are sound, and that standards are being met. Project assurance, when done properly, acts as your early-warning system, picking up potential issues and exposures so they can be addressed before they derail the project.

The problem? Many organisations don’t have a formal, accurate project assurance process, or it’s too ad-hoc, fragmented or last minute to be effective. Without this safety net, projects fly blind beyond the initial planning. Small problems stay hidden and snowball over time.

Without robust assurance, you compromise outcomes:

• Surprise budget overruns and delays that drain ROI.

• Erosion of board and stakeholder confidence in leadership’s ability to deliver.

• Loss of opportunity as troubled initiatives consume time and talent better spent elsewhere.

• Leadership fatigue, as executives get dragged into day-to-day firefighting.

All of us, especially executives and C-suiters hate surprises that affect the bottom line, and that’s exactly what poor project assurance breeds: uncertainty in whether initiatives will deliver. So, the cost of that uncertainty, that poor project assurance, is huge…not just in sterling, but in lost credibility and wasted effort.

Time to turn project assurance into ROI

Implementing rigorous assurance processes requires effort, but it pays for itself many times over:

1.         Greater stakeholder confidence and accountability: When you can demonstrate that your projects are under control thanks to rigorous assurance, stakeholders breathe easier. Boards and investors see this as proactive risk management, not reactive excuses. Improving transparency and real-time insight through an assurance tool and process, builds trust. And teams become more focused on quality, knowing that issues will be caught and addressed.  

2.         Early issue detection means cheaper fixes. It’s far less expensive to fix a small crack than a collapsed bridge. When you have regular assurance reviews and health checks, your project team can catch weaknesses early. The result is fewer budget surprises and less rework, directly saving money that would otherwise be spent on firefighting later.

3.         Better decision-making with real data: A strong assurance process gives you and senior executives reliable, up-to-date information about project status and risks. In fact, project assurance software can analyse vast amounts of project data to flag risks and recommend actions automatically. This means you can base decisions on evidence, not gut feeling or ‘similar’ past projects that aren’t really that similar.

4.         Efficiency and time saving: Assurance isn’t just extra bureaucracy; good assurance actually streamlines project delivery. It introduces a consistent framework and checkpoints, so teams aren’t reinventing the wheel or overlooking key steps. Implementing a dedicated assurance management system will save time and as we continue in the tech-first world, why not use it? FAST reduces review time by 20% and improves assurance efficiency by 14%.

5.         Fewer failed projects means bigger savings: Perhaps the biggest ROI boost comes from the projects that don’t fail. When assurance is woven into the DNA of project delivery, failure rates drop. Think about it, if you prevent a £5m project from imploding, that’s £5m saved (not to mention the additional value that project will generate when successful).

Over a portfolio of projects, the savings from avoiding failures and major overruns are enormous. This is ROI in its purest form: every penny spent on assurance can return many more in project value preserved.

Get the competitive advantage in projects with good assurance

The slow build-up of unmanaged risks and issues that went unchecked due to poor oversight can turn the most calculated plan into a screaming mess: burning tight budgets and shattering timelines. By improving assurance in projects, you can flip the script, turning it into a ROI driver rather than a cost.

Strengthening your assurance management comes through better processes, and for technology forward organisations, that’ll come in the form of dedicated project assurance software that cuts the work for your teams. Reducing the time spent on manual oversight tasks means your team can focus more on execution while still maintaining control. And fewer hours spent muddling through spreadsheets and status meetings means a faster path to project completion. Who doesn’t want that?

You really don’t have to accept project failure as an inevitable cost. With the right assurance strategies (and tools) in place, you can confidently deliver projects that fulfil their promises and boost your bottom line in the process. It’s time to turn on the lights, take control of project outcomes, and never be blindsided by this not-so-secret culprit again. Say yes to assurance, before it’s too late.

Want to cut your assurance workload? Try FAST, the project management assurance platform invented by practitioners for practitioners.