Observable condition
The business doubled in size over a few years. There are more people, more teams and more managers. On paper, capacity has grown. In practice, the days feel more crowded and the output has not kept pace. Meetings multiply. Messages need replies from five people instead of two. A decision that once took a conversation across a desk now takes a thread, a call and a follow-up to align everyone.
Managers say they are busier than ever, and it is true. But much of the effort goes into keeping people informed, reconciling plans and chasing updates, rather than into producing the work itself.
An illustrative example: a Sandton marketing agency grew from twelve to forty people. Each client now has an account lead, a strategist, a designer, a copywriter and a project coordinator. Every campaign change passes through at least three people before it reaches production. A client's small request that used to take an hour of one person's time now generates a dozen messages and a Thursday check-in.
Realisation
The realisation is that adding people adds connections, and every connection is a potential piece of coordination work. A team of five has ten possible pairs of people who might need to talk. A team of fifteen has more than a hundred. The work of keeping everybody aligned does not grow in step with headcount; it grows faster.
Atlassian's guidance on project coordination describes coordination as the work of aligning tasks, people and timing so that the pieces of a project fit together. That work is real and necessary. The pattern emerges when it expands to occupy a larger share of each person's week, and the business treats it as a cost of doing business rather than as something it can design down.
Realisation prompt: look at a typical week. What fraction of your time, and your team's time, goes to telling others what is happening, finding out what others are doing and waiting for approvals, rather than to producing the work?
Identification
This is a pattern of coordination overhead rising faster than capacity. The visible symptom is a bigger team with disappointing throughput and a calendar full of alignment activity. The common assumption is that people need to communicate better or that more management is required. The structural cause is that work is divided across more hands without clear boundaries, ownership and shared visibility, so each handover requires manual coordination.
The Pattern when hiring more people is the automatic answer to process strain describes the reflex that often starts this cycle, and the Pattern when your team is busy but output is not increasing shows how it feels from the inside.
Diagnosis
- Handovers multiply. Each additional specialist or layer adds a point where work passes from one person to another and information can be dropped. The Insight why work gets lost between teams explains how that happens.
- Ownership is unclear. When several people touch a piece of work, nobody is sure who decides. Atlassian's guidance on RACI charts is built around exactly this problem: making it explicit who is responsible, accountable, consulted and informed.
- Status lives in conversations. To learn where something stands, people ask. There is no shared place where the current state is visible, so updates are produced on request, repeatedly, for different audiences.
- Dependencies are discovered late. One team's plan relies on another's output, but the link is not recorded. Atlassian's material on dependency management describes how untracked dependencies become delays.
- Meetings replace visibility. Regular syncs are added to compensate for missing information. They help for a while, then become a fixed cost that nobody dares remove.
- Everyone is copied. To avoid being left out, people ask to be informed of everything, which increases the volume that each person must read to find what matters.
Commercial impact
The commercial value at stake is productivity per head, speed of delivery, management capacity and the economics of growth.
The headline cost is that each new hire adds less than the one before. If payroll grows faster than output, margin falls. In South African businesses where salaries are the largest cost and skilled people are hard to find and keep, that is a serious drag.
The second cost is speed. Decisions that need several people to align move at the pace of the slowest calendar. Customers experience this as slower responses and more handovers. The Pattern why new clients wait while internal teams coordinate shows how it appears from outside.
The third cost is attention. Managers who spend their days brokering alignment have little time for improvement, coaching or planning. The fourth is morale: capable people become frustrated when much of their effort feels like administration, and the best of them are the most likely to leave.
Common misidentification
The typical response is to add a coordinator or project manager to each team. Sometimes that is right, but if the underlying structure is unchanged, the coordinator becomes another node in the network, spending their time relaying messages between the people they were hired to align.
Another response is a new communication tool. A busier channel does not reduce the need to coordinate; it may increase the volume of messages. A third response is to run more meetings, which treats the symptom, the absence of shared information, with a recurring cost. A fourth is to blame individuals for poor communication, when the design of the work requires far more communication than a reasonable person can sustain.
Possibility
In a better state, teams are organised so that most work can be completed within a small group with clear ownership and a defined interface to the rest. Status is visible without asking. Decisions are delegated to a stated level, with criteria that let people act without checking. Meetings exist to decide things, not to find out what is happening.
The result is that growth in headcount produces growth in output, because the added people are not all absorbed by the cost of staying in touch. The Insight why your team keeps chasing information describes the information side of this in more detail.
Intervention
- Measure the overhead. For two weeks, ask a sample of staff to note time spent on updates, alignment meetings and waiting. Even a rough estimate shows where effort goes.
- Map one workflow end to end. Draw each person who touches a typical piece of work and each handover. Mark the points where delay or loss occurs.
- Reduce the number of handovers. Where possible, give one small group responsibility for a whole outcome rather than a slice of several.
- Clarify ownership. Use a simple responsibility chart for recurring decisions so that each has one accountable person and a short list of those who must be consulted.
- Make status visible. Put the current state of work in one shared place that updates as work moves, so nobody has to ask.
- Set decision limits. State what each role may decide alone, such as discounts up to an amount, so routine choices do not wait for approval.
- Prune meetings and copy lists. After status becomes visible, remove the syncs that exist only to share it.
Diagnostic questions
- Has output per person risen, stayed level or fallen since the last wave of hiring?
- How many people must see a typical piece of work before it is finished?
- For the last important decision, who was accountable and how many people had to agree?
- Can a manager see the status of key work without asking anyone?
- Which regular meeting would you cancel if its information were available elsewhere?
Bottom line
Bigger teams do not coordinate themselves. Each extra person adds links that someone must maintain, and if nothing is designed to carry that load, people become the carrier. The cure is rarely more communication. It is fewer handovers, clearer ownership and visible status, so that growth adds capacity instead of conversation.
Sources and further reading
- Project Coordination: 7 Must-have Skills
- RACI Chart: What is it & How to Use - The Workstream (last verified 10 October 2026)
- https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/dependency-management
Related Mellorca reading
- Why More Headcount Does Not Always Create More Capacity
- When Growth Makes the Business Feel Less Efficient
- When Client Onboarding Becomes a Growth Constraint