"makes it difficult to perform" is a perfectly acceptable phrase in written English.
You can use it whenever you want to indicate that something makes a task more challenging or difficult to do. For example, "Living in a remote part of the country makes it difficult to perform basic errands."
The ensuing damage makes it difficult to perform simple brain functions such as "listening" and "not talking".
Officials also labor under an antiquated computer system that makes it difficult to perform the most rudimentary kinds of analysis of financial information.
This may be explained by the highly subjective nature of the task, which makes it difficult to perform precise or universal analyses.
Scattering of the titanium dental implant makes it difficult to perform measurements from the bone-to-implant boundary to the buccal outer contour of the bone [19].
After all, many artists' collections are split up across multiple museums around the world, which makes it difficult to perform a comprehensive comparison of lifetime's work.
The current state-of-the-art, various forms of model-driven development, uses diagrams with defined abstract syntax but relatively-lose translational approaches to semantics, which makes it difficult to perform rigorous analysis and verification of models.
However, various problems unique to pregnancy make it difficult to perform a straightforward surgery.
Furthermore, he had acute respiratory distress syndrome, which made it difficult to perform laparotomy.
However, economic and logistical challenges make it difficult to perform the large-scale demonstrations needed to verify these model results.
Furthermore, Smt-MF mapping filters out too many of the partials from tones in octave 5, making it difficult to perform meaningful comparisons.
However, the temporal dispersion of BOLD fMRI activity resulted in responses to successive stimuli adding together, making it difficult to perform rapid event-related paradigms using fMRI.
