Many IT teams have grown dynamically in recent years – but their efficiency has not. The numbers look good on the slide: more people, more projects, bigger budgets. It’s just that the effects are sometimes the opposite – slower pace, more delays, decision-making chaos and an overtired team.
CIOs who observe this trend are increasingly coming to one conclusion: expanding the team does not solve structural problems. On the contrary, it can exacerbate them. And effective scaling starts not with recruitment, but with changing the way things are done.
Why team expansion doesn’t always work
The growing demand for digitalisation and business pressures mean that CIOs are often caught up in the ‘more people = more opportunities’ spiral. In theory, this sounds logical. In practice, it leads to complex, overloaded structures in which it is increasingly difficult to achieve real speed and transparency.
A team of 20 people works differently from a team of 120. There are layers of coordination, the need to synchronise with other departments, and every decision requires more context, more communication and more time. The cost of integration increases exponentially.
There is also a phenomenon of so-called lean chaos: everything is ‘in motion’, but little is being delivered. Managers are overwhelmed by planning and reporting, the team loses track of priorities and the CIO becomes a manager of complexity rather than an IT strategist.
Scaling by system, not by numbers
The best CIOs are starting to scale differently. Instead of increasing headcount, they look at the work system: the responsibility structure, the number of projects in progress, the quality of the backlog and the rhythm of decision-making. Their question is no longer “who should we hire?”, but “what is slowing down our team?”.
Effective scaling is about simplifying – not complicating. CIOs are starting to reduce the number of parallel initiatives, reduce redundant approval levels, reduce information access time. They are creating product teams rather than project teams, assigning responsibility to roles rather than individuals, and starting to manage a portfolio of priorities rather than a list of tasks.
This way of working does not always look glamorous – but it is much more effective.
Efficiency is not about control, it’s about clarity
In many IT organisations, attempts to improve efficiency end with micro-surveillance: more dashboards, detailed reporting and meticulous tracking of progress. The problem is that this rarely works. The team starts optimising for ‘visibility’ rather than value.
Effectiveness in IT is not about keeping an eye on the shuffle. It’s about creating an environment where the team knows what really matters, can make its own decisions and understands when something no longer makes sense.
A CIO who wants to realistically increase effectiveness does not start with control tools, but with a change of context. Clear objectives, a clear accountability structure, the ability to abandon projects that do not deliver value – these are factors that restore momentum and reduce internal friction.
What are leaders doing differently to get out of an impasse
A few common behaviours emerge among CIOs who have successfully led their teams through the ‘sprawl without effect’ stage.
One of them decided to take a radical step – reducing the number of active projects to 30% of the previous figure. The result? Teams were able to focus on delivering rather than jumping between tasks. Efficiency increased and stress levels fell.
Another CIO implemented weekly decision-making reviews with a clear structure instead of successive reports: what blocks, what needs to be decided, what needs to be stopped. This stopped it being a point of escalation and the teams regained agility.
Still another introduced a simplified responsibility matrix, where each project had only one decision-making owner. This stopped decisions disappearing and ended ‘everyone knew, but no one did’ situations.
In none of these cases was staffing increased. On the contrary, less was being done, but more efficiently.
The future of IT is not more people, but less chaos
IT teams will continue to grow – but that doesn’t mean they have to become more complex. The most value today is not in the next wave of recruitment, but in the bold decisions to simplify structure, sort out priorities and let go of things that don’t work.
CIOs who scale through the system, not through headcount, reclaim space for strategy, investment and real innovation. Those who try to solve every problem by hiring are increasingly held hostage by their own structure.
