Professional services firms plan projects carefully, yet a large share of delivery time goes to work nobody planned. New Unit4 research puts a figure on it: project delivery and operational managers in UK firms lose almost one working day every week to inefficiency and unplanned work.
The UK findings, released September 24, come from 125 UK respondents in a June 2026 Vanson Bourne survey. A companion global report, Reclaiming Time, Protecting Margin, covers 650 decision-makers across the US, UK, and Europe.
Read together, they make one case: project change is unavoidable, and fragmented data is what turns it into lost time and revenue.
Where Project Time Goes
In the UK, 69% of firms say unplanned work has increased over the past 12 months, and around 30% of a typical project’s time is attributed to it. Managing scope changes or unclear requirements is the leading cause (53%), followed by rework and error correction (49%), chasing updates and approvals (41%), and internal meetings that add little value (41%).
Some of that pressure comes from clients. Some comes from how firms operate. In the global report, 55% of respondents say they spend more time coordinating across systems, teams, and locations, and 51% say project data is getting harder to access, trust, or reconcile. When information is spread across systems, every scope change starts with finding and matching data before anyone can respond.
How Lost Time Becomes Lost Revenue
UK respondents estimate that around 8% of project revenue is lost to inefficiency. Seventy-nine percent say operational inefficiency hurts financial performance, 58% report an impact on project margins, and 54% say it limits their ability to take on new work.
The global report estimates average revenue at risk of $22.5 million per organization, or about $54,000 per delivery professional. Unit4 notes that larger firms raise these averages and presents them as an indication of exposure, not a market-wide figure.
The more useful finding is the double effect. Inefficiency reduces the margin on projects already underway and uses up the capacity firms need to win and staff the next ones.
What Connected Firms Do Differently
The UK sample splits almost evenly: 54% run multiple disconnected systems, while 46% use largely integrated or unified ones. Connected firms are more than twice as likely to manage project performance proactively or predictively (76% vs. 31%). Disconnected firms are much more likely to regularly reverse or revisit decisions made with incomplete data (79% vs. 43%).
Integration is still incomplete for most. Eighty-five percent of UK firms lack a unified, real-time view of project data, and 70% rely on manual workarounds. AI interest is high, with 94% saying AI-enabled tools could improve project decisions, yet only 26% use AI widely. Globally, 52% of connected firms use AI widely, compared with 16% of disconnected firms.
Donna Dobson, Global Director Professional Services at Unit4, said integration “is becoming a competitive advantage” for firms trying to protect margins and delivery capacity. The research is vendor-commissioned and shows an association between connected data and better outcomes, not proof that integration alone causes them.
What This Means for ERP Insiders
Count unplanned work as a cost: ERP teams should track how much project time goes to rework, approvals, and reconciliation so business cases reflect recovered delivery capacity and margin.
Connect project, resource, and financial data first: Seeing scope, staffing, and margin changes early depends on data that already sits in one trusted model, which reduces the decisions teams later have to reverse.
Sequence AI after integration: AI for resource planning and risk prediction works from the data underneath it, so integration work sets the limit on what AI can deliver in project operations.
