Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can bring real value to companies. Done right, it saves time, reduces errors, and enables employees to focus on important work. But many RPA projects don’t go as planned. Some never move past the testing stage. Others go live but create confusion, costs, or frustration.
In this post, I will explain four key reasons why RPA projects fail – and more importantly, what you can do to prevent it. These lessons were learned from multiple projects across various industries and company sizes.
1. No Governance from the Start
Before the first bot is even built, one thing should be clear: who is responsible for what?
Too often, governance is simply skipped to get the project started asap. There are no clear rules about the access of RPA users on target systems, rights and roles are unclear, development standards don’t exist, and the change and documenting processes were not even mentioned.
Teams move fast—until something breaks, or an auditor asks, “Where’s the documentation?”
Trying to fix this after ten bots are live is much harder than starting simple governance early. It doesn’t need to be complex. Even a few key decisions—like naming standards, approval steps, and roles—can create structure and avoid future chaos.
Learning: Build a solid foundation that meets your company’s standard. Define roles, responsibilities, and basic standards before development starts. This may sound slow and boring at the beginning, but it will pay off many times over in the long run.
2. No Strategic Positioning – RPA Stays Small
RPA initiatives often start non-IT departments – finance, HR, customer service. That’s a great way to test ideas. But too often, these pilots stay isolated. They don’t connect with IT or other departments. They don’t align with company strategy and when it’s time to grow, things fall apart.
Without involving the company-IT early on and asking for support and guidance, scaling becomes risky. And without a shared vision, teams repeat the same mistakes.
RPA is not a local tool – it’s part of a broader digital automation strategy. It needs both bottom-up energy and top-down support. Business teams and IT need to work together, and everyone should understand the goals and the roadmap.
Learning: Don’t just “try RPA”—integrate it into your company’s digital automation journey. It has to become one tool in the company’s toolbox for automating processes efficiently. Only this way a hybrid bottom-up and top-down approach can work and make the project a real success.
3. Development and Maintenance are Way Harder Than They Seem
At first, RPA may look simple: record your process, make a few adjustments, hit play, and you’re done. But building bots that work in real life is not so easy. Small changes in the target application interface, network issues, or exceptions in data can break your automation, without you even noticing it. Bots need error handling, clean and reusable components, transparency and standardization.
Also, building a bot is just the beginning. After Go Live, someone needs to monitor it, fix it when things go wrong, and update it over time. That’s the real work and one part of the project, that causes the most frustration – both for the developers and the end users. If this is ignored, your developers will soon be overwhelmed by support requests, and the end users lose trust— so bots are never used again. Worst case scenario has arrived.
Learning: Treat bots like software products, not prototypes. Use a structured, repeatable approach to build, test, and support them. Think long-term from day one.
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4. High Costs from Poor License Utilization
All good and enterprise ready RPA platforms aren’t free – often the licenses cost quite a lot. And yet, many companies overbuy licenses too early or don’t use them efficiently.
A typical pattern is as follows. A company buys 10 licenses for unattended bot runs. They only use a couple of them – or maybe they even use all of them, but in most cases in a 1 to 1 ratio. One bot blocks one license. While the bots run for one or two hours a day, the licenses idle for the other 22 hours daily and simply produce unutilized costs.
Soon, the RPA project is labeled “too expensive”—not because RPA failed, but because it was used poorly.
Learning: Start small and use bots where they bring real value. Measure ROI from the beginning and make every hour for each license count. Only an efficient RPA project can be a sustainable and successful project.
Final Thought: It’s Not Just About Bots
RPA is about more than just technology. It’s about people, processes, and change. When things go wrong, it’s rarely because the tool didn’t work. It’s because expectations weren’t aligned, planning was rushed, or support wasn’t in place.
The good news? These issues can be avoided. With clear governance, a smart rollout plan, realistic expectations, and ongoing support, RPA can deliver on its promise—and more.
So, if you’re starting an RPA journey, or stuck in one, take a step back. Look at the full picture. Fixing the basics might be the most powerful thing you do.