A project can have someone accountable for every task and still have no one accountable for what happens between teams. I think this is one of the less obvious problems in project and programme delivery, especially in organisations running multiple interconnected initiatives.
Imagine a digital transformation programme involving technology, operations, compliance and customer service. Each team has its own deliverables, timelines, risks and performance reports. Technology has completed its configuration, operations has documented the new processes, and compliance is progressing with its review. Individually, the workstreams appear healthy.
But technology cannot go live because compliance approval is still pending. Operations cannot complete training because the final system configuration has not been confirmed, and customer service cannot prepare adequately because the operating procedures are still changing.
Nobody is necessarily failing at their assigned tasks. The problem is that progress within each workstream is being measured more effectively than readiness across the entire programme. A project can therefore remain green while a critical dependency is already putting the wider programme outcome at risk.
PMI's 2026 Pulse of the Profession highlights how increasing project complexity is being driven partly by expanding stakeholder networks, competing priorities and coordination challenges. It reinforces something worth examining: the success of interconnected projects depends not only on how well individual teams perform, but also on how effectively their work comes together.
This is why I believe dependency management should go beyond maintaining a register of what one team needs from another. Critical dependencies should have clear ownership, agreed delivery and acceptance conditions, realistic dates, and an escalation mechanism to resolve competing priorities.
Programme reviews should also examine dependency health separately from individual project status. The question is not only if each project is progressing, but if related deliverables are coming together in the right sequence to support the next stage of the programme.
More importantly, governance needs clear decision rights when priorities conflict. Recording a dependency is useful, but if project managers are repeatedly left to negotiate the same resource, approval or sequencing conflicts without programme-level intervention, the dependency is visible but not truly being managed.
A programme is not successful simply because all its constituent projects report progress. Their outputs must eventually work together to produce the intended benefits. I wonder how many delivery problems we classify as project delays when the real issue is unresolved dependencies, unclear decision or weak coordination between teams.
How are cross-project dependencies handled in your organisation? Is there clear ownership, or are project managers left to negotiate them individually.
Good ideas get better in conversation.
