Update management, don’t discard it

A tempting conclusion

When work breaks between teams, a familiar response follows. Knowledge workers are skilled professionals, the argument goes, and management structure only slows them down. Take the layers away, trust people, and they will sort it out.

That is half right. The people are usually capable, as lesson 1.1 showed. But removing structure does not remove the interfaces between them. It only means each one is left to goodwill, memory and whoever happens to know whom.

The better answer is to update management for how work is done now, not to discard it.

When Harbourline was small

Harbourline was founded in Cork in 2008 as a software house. For years it was a few dozen people in one office. When a developer needed something from the support team, they walked across the floor and asked. Everyone knew who to ask, and the people asking and answering shared the same picture of the work.

Nobody wrote down what a support team needed before a release, because nobody had to. The agreement existed. It was simply held in people’s heads, and the heads were all in the same room.

What stopped working

Then Harbourline grew. It bought an integration firm in Kraków in 2022 and a service-desk firm in Pune in 2023, and opened in Hartford in 2024. It is now about 250 people in four offices, with three ways of working under one name.

The handoffs that used to cross a floor now cross countries and time zones. An integration engineer in Kraków and a Service Desk analyst in Pune may never have met. The walk across the floor no longer reaches, and the knowledge of who to ask belongs to a few long-serving people.

Nothing about the people got worse. What stopped working was the assumption that the right person would find out. In March 2025 a new service for one client went live over a weekend with no run-book and no monitoring for the support team in Pune. Every team had done its own part. Nobody owned the join.

Workarounds are a structural problem, not a motivation problem

When an interface is broken, experienced people work around it. They ring a contact they trust, keep a private list, or fix the result by hand. Managers then complain about low initiative: why does nobody stop and fix the process?

Because there is nowhere to raise it and no way to resolve it. Without that, working around the problem is the only rational choice. A culture that rewards getting it done over getting it done right first time quietly trains people to keep doing so.

Informal collaboration also rests on belief rather than evidence. People believe they work well together, and often they do. But the belief is carried by particular people. When they move on, the organisation’s ability to work across that interface leaves with them and has to be rebuilt.

Update, don’t discard

Traditional management was built to manage people inside a function: a clear line from the chief executive to the team leader, standards, review and accountability. Those still matter. The problem is that the work now runs sideways, across functions and offices, and the vertical line was never designed to manage that.

Updating management means keeping what works and changing where it is aimed:

It is tempting to assume AI will absorb this problem. It will not, at least not soon. AI is good at well-defined tasks with plenty of data. Deciding who owns a handoff, assigning work across teams and agreeing a shared standard are the parts it is furthest from touching, because they depend on structure that has to be designed first.

What software teams learned

Software went through the same change as systems grew too large for any one person to hold in their head. The answer was not less discipline but a different kind.