A quarter of the benefits of IT projects are being lost by organisations across the globe because of management failures during a project’s lifecycle, according to new research.

KPMG International's survey of 600 organisations across 22 countries revealed that 86% of respondents reported the loss of up to a quarter of their targeted benefits across their project portfolios.

Nearly half of respondents reported at least one project failure in the past year, an improvement from KPMG’s 2003 survey where 57% experienced one or more project failures in the previous 12 months.

Chris Gumn, a partner in KPMG’s IT advisory group, was surprised to find that 59% of organisations had no management process to measure benefits.

‘The loss of benefits is particularly important in the changing definition of success. With an increased focus on governance issues, board and executive involvement has increased, and our results show that boards are approving up to 40% of business cases,' he said.

'Success is increasingly being defined as achieving the promised benefits, as opposed to the traditional focus on time and budget measures.’

He also stressed that a robust governance framework was vital to reducing project failures, while a project management office could oversee key areas such as risk management.