Anyone who manages business projects knows the feeling of starting the day with a plan that looks solid and watching it fall apart within a few hours. All it takes is an email flagging a check that runs longer than expected, or a department asking for a last-minute change, and the carefully built balance begins to wobble. After all, sticking to a project’s initial plan is almost always harder than it seems.
This reality is captured by the Pulse of the Profession 2026, the annual report from the Project Management Institute (PMI), now in its sixteenth edition, which gathers the experience of professionals around the world. The picture that emerges is clear. 97% of professionals managed at least one complex project in the past year, while 31% of complex projects do not fully achieve the expected benefits.
The most encouraging figure, though, comes from those who manage to keep complexity under control. According to the PMI, these projects are five times more likely to succeed. The secret is not avoiding difficulties, but recognizing them in time and looking at the project as a whole, an approach the report calls systems thinking. Let’s look at the main challenges the research highlights and how to tackle them.
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Challenge 1: Interdependencies turn a small delay into a big problem
The real difficulty is not the single delay, but the chain reaction it sets off. When activities depend on one another and involve several departments, a seemingly simple change is enough to shift the entire plan. The trouble is that these dependencies often stay invisible, and the Project Manager notices only once the delay has already hit other deadlines. It happens, for instance, when the release of a new software stays on hold waiting for another team’s checks while the following activities slip one after another.
Tackling this challenge means making the relationships between activities visible from the start. Having the dependencies in plain sight makes it possible to understand in advance which deliverables a delay would affect and to act before the problem spreads, instead of chasing it once it has already happened.
Challenge 2: Completing tasks does not mean generating value
The second challenge concerns how we measure success. Meeting deadlines matters, but completing tasks does not guarantee the expected results. As the project moves forward, priorities change and new needs arise, and whoever ignores them risks closing a project that only partly meets the company’s real needs.
The path the Pulse of the Profession 2026 points to is shifting the focus to the value actually generated, not just to completed tasks. In practice, tracking progress should go hand in hand with a constant check on business objectives, especially in long projects, where what was needed at the start may no longer be what is needed at the end.
Challenge 3: Poor visibility into real progress
The third challenge is getting a reliable picture of progress when each department works with different tools. To find out whether a deliverable will be met, you often have to write directly to the person in charge, because the available data does not really show where the work stands. Repeated across dozens of activities, this chase eats into the very time meant for managing the project.
The solution is to centralize information in a single system. With a tool like the Gantt chart, activities can be read along a timeline and dependencies become clear, so when a deadline moves it is immediate to see which other deliverables will be affected.
Challenge 4: A resource allocation that doesn’t hold up in practice
This challenge is about people more than tasks. A project can slow down even with a correct plan, if the people working on it are busy in parallel on other initiatives. Without a view of the commitments already made, the Project Manager plans around an availability that, in practice, does not exist, and finds out when the deadline is already at risk.
To get past it, you need to monitor workloads and correct imbalances before they hit the deadlines. Seeing how activities are distributed makes it possible to reorganize assignments when needed, with the added benefit of easing the pressure on people and building a more realistic plan.
Challenge 5: Spotting problems when it’s too late
The last challenge is a matter of timing. Relying only on periodic meetings to understand how the work is going often leads to discovering problems too late, when an activity has been stuck for days and the room to recover has already shrunk.
The solution is to follow progress as the work unfolds, not only at fixed intervals. Automatic alerts flag when an activity needs attention without waiting for a manual check, so decisions are made on up-to-date information and the project stays under control even when priorities change.
Deepser supports teams along this path with its Project Management module, which brings activities and progress together in a single environment. Gantt charts make dependencies visible, while automatic alerts flag delays in time. Resource management tools, in addition, help keep workloads under control. Thanks to the integration with the Service module, projects connect to tickets and Change requests, with information always accessible to the teams involved. Discover how Deepser simplifies project management and lets your team work with more visibility. Request a free demo.
