What leaders usually conclude
The common first read is a capacity problem — too few experienced project managers for too many live sites — and the common first response is to hire more of them. This is not wrong so much as incomplete. Jay Galbraith’s information-processing account of organisation design, published in Interfaces, argued that the amount of coordination a business needs to perform rises with task uncertainty, and that organisations facing rising information-processing demands require deliberate design responses — not simply more people doing the same job in parallel, but structures such as self-contained units, dedicated vertical information systems, or lateral relations built specifically to carry the coordination load. Adding project managers without addressing how information moves between projects and into a shared view of the whole increases headcount without increasing the organisation’s actual capacity to process what it now needs to track.
Ronald Coase’s foundational account of why firms exist in the first place, published in Economica in 1937, offers a complementary way to see the same problem: coordinating activity inside an organisation is not free — it has a real cost, which is precisely why firms exist rather than every transaction happening through the open market. A real estate firm running ten concurrent projects is asking its internal coordination mechanisms to absorb a cost that scales with the number of connections between projects competing for the same finance approvals, the same specialist contractors, the same legal resource — not simply with the number of projects itself.
Taken together, Galbraith and Coase point to the same conclusion from different directions: a firm’s ability to deliver projects concurrently is not simply a multiple of its ability to deliver one project well. A firm that can run three projects smoothly with a given set of shared resources may find that a fifth or sixth project does not add a proportional amount of strain — it adds a disproportionate amount, because each new project multiplies the number of competing claims on the same finite pool of finance sign-off, legal review and senior judgement, rather than simply adding one more claim to a queue.
What the evidence suggests
This distinction matters because it points to where the strain concentrates. It is rarely the technical delivery of any individual site that degrades first — the professionals running each project are usually competent and motivated. What degrades first is the shared resource layer sitting underneath every project simultaneously: the finance team approving drawdowns across the whole pipeline, the legal function reviewing contracts for every site, the handful of senior people whose sign-off is required regardless of which project is asking. A firm can add project managers indefinitely and still bottleneck here, because this layer was typically built for a much smaller number of simultaneous claims on its time.
A further complication is that this shared-resource strain does not show up in any individual project’s own reporting. Each project team reports honestly that their own workstream is progressing; none of them is positioned to see that their finance approval is the eleventh in a queue that used to have three. The organisation experiences slowdown as a diffuse, hard-to-locate feeling precisely because no single project’s dashboard is built to reveal a constraint that sits between projects rather than inside one. This is closely related to the coordination question examined in Zoom Riddle’s perspective on coordinating operations across multiple teams, where the same shared-resource pattern recurs outside real estate specifically.
A practical consequence worth naming is that the people best placed to notice this strain — the senior finance and legal staff whose queues have lengthened — are often the least likely to raise it as an organisational issue, because a longer queue reads, from inside that function, as simply a busier period rather than as evidence that the firm’s delivery model has structurally changed. The signal is present in their day-to-day experience well before it is present in any report, but nothing in most reporting structures asks them to translate “I am busier than I used to be” into “the organisation’s shared capacity has been outpaced by its project count.”
Where this shows up
This perspective is written with real estate businesses in mind. It sits within the Asset and Production-Based grouping, and the questions it raises recur in other sectors too.
Questions worth considering
- Which resources are currently shared across every live project rather than dedicated to any single one, and were they sized for the current number of concurrent claims on them?
- If delivery feels slower without any individual project reporting a problem, where would that slowdown actually be visible?
- What would change if the constraint were treated as a shared-resource question rather than a project-management headcount question?
- Has anyone asked the people running the shared functions — finance, legal, senior sign-off — whether their own sense of workload has changed, rather than waiting for that change to surface in a formal report?
Your team is facing similar challenges?
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