Organisation view
Current structure separates product demand from engineering delivery.
Each circle represents a person. People sit inside teams of roughly ten, with one manager per team. In the current model, product and engineering report into separate silos, so only the aligned portion of work creates useful delivery capacity.
Recommendation
Define business nodes with a single accountable change portfolio. Each node has a lead product manager and lead engineer; their combined budgets equal the total change capacity of the enterprise. The Nodes can align to any product execution approach (for example, a Node could align to a group of Pods / Squads in an Agile framework).
Projects not delivered this cycle
Shown as a percentage of total projects, with count breakdown underneath.
Useful work61%
Wasted / delayed39%
Manager
CEO
forced to intermediate
Product silo
100 product managers · 20 teams
Engineering silo
400 engineers · 40 teams
Executive hypothesis
Misalignment makes the bank appear to be slow and/or under-resourced, when the deeper problem is ownership and alignment.
When product and engineering teams optimise different priority lists, capacity is consumed by work that cannot land, by dependency chasing, and by escalations. The cure is not just “more headcount”; it is a node where one product lead and one engineering lead own one coherent set of objectives, budget, and change capacity.
Interactive model
The same headcount produces different outcomes depending on objective alignment.
Change the assumptions. The left side represents the current misaligned operating model; the right side shows the proposed node-aligned model using the same total change resources.
Current silos
57%
Recommended nodes
88%
Current silos
43%
13% unutilised · 30% misaligned / penalties
Recommended nodes
12%
0% unutilised · 12% misaligned / penalties
Current silos
74%
282 projects: 48 shared · 234 local
Recommended nodes
26%
34 projects: 18 shared · 16 local
Capacity bridge
Demand above 100% becomes a delivery illusion: teams are busy, but the portfolio cannot land.
Outcome split
What the enterprise experiences from the same nominal capacity.
Accountability map
Fewer priority owners means fewer CEO escalations.
Current model
60
independent priority-setting teams
Node-aligned model
20
accountable node leads
Mathematical model
The model deliberately separates capacity, demand, and alignment.
Shared effort unit = planned capacity consumed by shared priorities ÷ shared project count.
Local demand = local projects per team × number of teams × local effort weighting × shared effort unit.
Total demand = shared demand + local demand.
Shared delivery = shared projects are delivered if there is enough effective capacity. When total demand exceeds effective capacity, the available capacity is shared proportionally across shared and local work.
Local delivery = local projects require both capacity and alignment. The model allocates capacity to local work proportionally, then only the aligned share counts as useful in the current cycle.
Aligned delivery assumption = when teams are aligned and have capacity, the model assumes they deliver useful work. In reality this may still fail, but removing misalignment as a variable allows more agile working and removes one major variable when diagnosing failed projects.
Project delivery shortfall = useful delivered effort ÷ effort per project. The headline statistic is projects not delivered as a percentage of total projects in that structure, with the detail line showing the shared and local project-equivalent counts.
Wasted or delayed work = capacity that is unutilised, capacity lost to dependency drag, and work that receives capacity but is not useful in the current cycle because it is not aligned.
Node-aligned outcome = same capacity, but with higher alignment and lower local-priority leakage.
Node local demand = current local demand multiplied by the residual misalignment in the node model. If team alignment for node prioritised projects is 90%, residual node-local demand is 10% of current local demand.
Dependency drag = misaligned local work served × dependency drag percentage. This reduces effective capacity for the whole business and uses the same calculation in both the Current Silos and Recommended Nodes models.
Current-cycle usefulness = we cannot distinguish between wasted and delayed work without knowing whether a project eventually gets delivered or not. All we know is that the work is not useful in the current cycle, as the project cannot be delivered. The project may never be prioritised, or may be delivered in a future cycle.
Average size of each local project = the average effort of a local team initiative as a percentage of one shared-priority project.
Baseline interpretation
With 80 shared projects consuming 100% of planned change capacity, 60 teams each adding 5 local projects at 20% of a shared project creates roughly another 75% demand. The enterprise has therefore scheduled 175% of its available change capacity before any misalignment penalty is applied.
This is why every function can feel locally rational and still collectively fail: each team sees legitimate work, but the total portfolio is mathematically impossible.
How local capacity is calculated
Local work is calculated from the number of teams, the number of local items each team initiates, and the effort size of each local item relative to a shared project. In the baseline, 60 teams × 5 local items × 20% of a shared project × the shared effort unit creates roughly 75% extra demand.
Operating model comparison
From chaotic matrix negotiation, forcing waterfall style governance, to node accountability.
Current state
- Product and engineering teams optimise different backlogs.
- Engineering lacks clear product ownership in some domains.
- Central functions create valid demand without matched delivery capacity.
- Waterfall planning becomes the workaround for unclear accountability.
- The CEO arbitrates conflicts that should be resolved inside the node.
Proposed state
- Each node has one coherent objective set below it.
- Lead product and engineering owners jointly plan the node budget.
- The sum of node change resources is designed to equal total enterprise capacity; to force accountability for all work.
- Escalation is reserved for genuine business trade-offs, not resource confusion.
- Delivery accountability is visible: one objective, one node, one answer.
- Compatible with any project execution style, including Agile, Lean and Waterfall.
CEO Talking Points
CEO Talking Points
- “Our issue is not only absolute resource. It is that product and engineering capacity is not always aligned with the same business objective.”
- “That creates hidden overcommitment: teams pursue local priorities on top of the shared portfolio, so the bank experiences 175% demand against 100% capacity.”
- “The visible symptoms are delay, re-prioritisation meetings, blame transfer, and decisions escalating to you.”
- “The structural fix is to create accountable nodes: each node has a product lead and engineering lead jointly responsible for objectives, budget, and change capacity.”