If No One Objected, Why Did the Project Fail?

Why do digital projects fail when nobody objects? Usually because silence is not agreement. People see the problem, say “okay” in the meeting, and save their doubts for the corridor. The BBC’s Digital Media Initiative is the £98.4 million proof.

What happened to the BBC’s £98.4 million project?

Go back to 2008. Much of the BBC’s archive still sits on tape. The big idea is one digital system for everything, from the camera to the archive. A reporter finds footage from their desk. An editor searches the archive in seconds.

Siemens gets the contract. In 2009 that deal ends, and the BBC builds the system in-house, with its own people. Meetings happen. Reports get written. Timelines move. Five years go by.

In May 2013, the new Director-General, Tony Hall, shuts the project down.

The UK’s public spending watchdog, the National Audit Office (NAO), did the maths. The BBC spent £125.9 million. It got £27.5 million back through its settlement with Siemens. That left a net cost of £98.4 million.

Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee did not soften it. Its chair, Margaret Hodge, called the project “a complete failure”. The committee found that the BBC had used the system to make just one programme.

The money hurts. The time bothers me more. Five years passed before anyone banged the table.

What does a silent “okay” sound like?

You have probably sat in this meeting. Monday, 10:00. A new ERP system is on the screen. ERP is the big software that runs a company’s orders, stock and money in one place. The project manager asks, “Does this work for everyone?”

The sales manager checks a phone. The warehouse lead starts to speak, then stops. Someone from finance says “okay.” Everyone leaves ten minutes early.

Three months later, the warehouse still runs on old Excel files. Sales enters nothing into the new system. Finance has reports that do not match. The board slide gives one reason. “Users resisted the change.”

That “okay” was never a yes. It was a polite way to say “I don’t want this fight right now.” Think of a friend who calls a meal “fine.” You both know what that means.

Why does “okay” not mean everyone agrees?

In Harvard Business Review Türkiye, Doğukan Odabaşı writes about why teams understand the same decision differently (in Turkish). People sit in the same room and look at the same slide. Then they walk out with different ideas of what was decided. Nobody is lying. Each person hears the decision through their own job, and nobody says so out loud.

His article starts from NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter. In 1999, NASA’s Mishap Investigation Board found the cause. One ground software file gave thruster data in English units. The team plotting the spacecraft’s path assumed metric units, as the interface documents required. The spacecraft was lost when it reached Mars. Same numbers, two readings.

This is false consensus. The real objection comes later, by the coffee machine, and never reaches the project plan.

The Silence Fails study, presented at a Project Management Institute (PMI) conference in 2013, put numbers on this. The researchers surveyed more than 1,000 executives and project professionals in 40 companies and looked at more than 2,200 projects. Most projects, they found, fail for reasons that many people see and few discuss. When people get better at these hard conversations, project performance improves by 50 to 70 percent or more.

McKinsey’s article on planning a better decision meeting says good decisions come from well-prepared discussion. If nobody knows what the meeting is for, or who makes the call, even a brave objection gets lost.

Is the software really to blame?

When a project fails, everyone blames the tech first. The system is slow. The screens are confusing. Some of that may be true. It is rarely the whole story.

The consulting firm BCG found that only about 30 percent of digital transformations reach their goals. The figure rests on a survey of 825 senior executives plus BCG’s work with 70 companies. A study by EY and the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School surveyed more than 2,000 leaders and employees in 23 countries. Transformations that scored above average on six key drivers had a 73 percent chance of success. Those below average had 28 percent. Most of those drivers are about people, such as leaders who listen and clear roles.

In October 2026, MIT Sloan Management Review published an article by Curtis A. Merriweather Jr., a researcher at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. He says leaders treat bad data and a hard-to-use system as one problem when they study a failure. They are two problems, and fixing one does not fix the other. His argument draws on a survey of 564 doctors about electronic health records. Get the diagnosis wrong and the cure is wrong too. First comes new training, then a new system, then a new disappointment. It is like buying new glasses when the window is dirty.

Maybe that is what the warehouse lead wanted to say. “The screen is nice, but the stock numbers inside it are wrong.” Nobody heard it. Later, everyone called it “resistance.”

What really went wrong at the BBC?

Back to the BBC. The NAO’s findings read more like a story about people not talking than a tech story. Progress reports focused on technology risks, and said little about whether staff actually worked in a new way. At the end of 2011, the project’s risk rating got much worse. The BBC’s executive board heard about it in June 2012, six months later. Meanwhile, users lost faith in the system, and some production teams that moved to Salford set up their own storage. People knew. The news just did not travel up in time.

The Silence Fails study has a name for this game. Project Chicken. Picture two cars driving at each other, each waiting for the other to swerve. Every team knows it is behind. Whoever admits it first takes the blame, and everyone else who is behind gets extra time. So the BBC had its “okay” moment too. The room was just bigger, and the bill was £98.4 million.

How can you fix the Monday meeting?

You do not need a new method. A few small habits will do.

• Ask open questions. Swap “Does this work?” for “Where will this plan get stuck in your team?” Yes-or-no questions make silence easy.
• Let the most junior person speak first. Once the boss has spoken, most people just agree.
• Write it down. What was decided? Who owns each task? By when? Confirm it in the last few minutes and share the notes within 24 hours if you can. Anyone who understood it differently will speak up then. I go deeper on agendas and meeting notes in meeting management tools.
• Check the data and the screen separately. If people hate the system, find out whether the problem is the screen or the numbers inside it.
• Start small. Try the system with one team first. Think of it as a minimum viable product, the simplest version real users can test.

Everyone loves the new system in PowerPoint. Real objections show up once people use it.

Projects rarely sink from one big mistake. They sink from many small sentences nobody said. So the next time someone says “okay” in your meeting, pause and ask one more question. “What worries you most about this?”