High-growth businesses are often praised for their speed. But when deadlines slip, rework piles up, or teams burn out, the root cause is rarely pace. It’s a lack of process.
To keep things moving, teams often lean on manual workarounds: a spreadsheet no one else sees, a WhatsApp message instead of a documented handover, or a senior team member quietly bridging gaps. While these aren’t signs of failure, they’re indicators of a fragile delivery system that’s reliant on individual effort.
Over time, what begins as a temporary fix becomes a permanent pattern. Visibility breaks down. Roles blur. Accountability fragments. And as complexity increases, the risk multiplies.
These organisational symptoms mirror what’s playing out at a national level, where delivery capacity is consistently falling short of demand.
Labour productivity in Australia’s residential construction sector has declined by 12% over the last 30 years. Meanwhile, national housing delivery targets are falling short. Under the National Housing Accord, Australia must deliver 1.2 million homes by 2029, but Deloitte Access Economics expects fewer than 1 million completions over the next five years. Besides labour shortages, the core issue is structural: slow approvals, system gaps, and process breakdowns.
While often framed as a macroeconomic issue, the real challenge lies in how organisations operate day to day. And it starts inside companies. How delivery is designed, how systems evolve, and how leadership creates the conditions for scale.
Where Workaround Culture Takes Hold
One of the most overlooked barriers to performance is the absence of operational foundations. As organisations grow, they often add people and projects faster than they upgrade their systems.
Without deliberate investment in planning, governance, and process, informal workarounds begin to fill the gaps: verbal briefings, side-channel approvals, undocumented decision-making.
These workarounds often go unchallenged. Not because they’re effective, but because they feel faster than building systems. In the absence of clear process ownership, they become the path of least resistance.
They’re adaptive at first, but over time, they introduce drag. Accountability gets blurred. Teams lose clarity. And small inefficiencies start to scale with the business.
The Spiral: From Fix to Friction
Early-stage growth often relies on exceptional individuals to drive outcomes. But when delivery depends on heroics instead of systems, performance becomes unpredictable.
Timelines slip. Quality fluctuates. Teams burn out. Leaders spend more time managing exceptions than building momentum.
As the Productivity Commission points out, this fragility is already visible across Australia’s construction sector. One delayed approval, trade shortage, or system gap can trigger cascading failures across an entire project.
Today, the average time to complete a home has stretched from 6.4 months to 10.4 months. Approvals take so long that previously granted permits, such as environmental clearances, sometimes need to be resubmitted. Delays don’t just shift timelines. They compound risk, increase rework, and derail delivery.
The Role of Planning and Process
One way to test your delivery system is to ask: If the volume of work doubled next quarter, what would break first?
In most cases, the answer isn’t capability, but coordination. Growth tends to expose what hasn’t been standardised. So, when systems aren’t aligned, teams interpret priorities differently. As a result, schedules drift and handoffs break. And what looks like a capacity issue is often a coordination gap. People working hard, but not together.
Planning isn’t just a finance task or a delivery checkpoint. It’s the connective tissue that aligns expectations, timelines, and decision-making across the organisation.
You can’t scale high-performing delivery if every team is working to a different clock. The value of planning isn’t in predicting every outcome, it’s in defining how decisions are made as complexity increases.
Done well, strategic planning reduces rework, codifies ways of working, and turns implicit knowledge into systems others can follow. It shifts growth from being people-dependent to being process-enabled.
Technology Is Not the Fix
When delivery struggles, the instinct is often to invest in tools, such as new dashboards, automation platforms, or tracking software. But technology only works in accelerating what’s already working. It cannot compensate for missing processes.
Consider the ATM: a user-agnostic, repeatable system. Whether you withdraw $10 or $1,000, the steps are the same. Its reliability doesn’t come from the machine, but rather from the standardised process behind it.
Digital tools in infrastructure and construction are no different. Without foundational clarity, software becomes just another layer of complexity. Or worse, another workaround.
When coordination breaks down, even high-performing teams hit a ceiling.
We’ve seen this firsthand. One client who’s managing a $50M+ infrastructure program, had scaled quickly: more projects, merged teams, expanding scope. But their systems hadn’t caught up.
They were relying on manual reporting, duplicated updates, and senior staff stepping in to hold it all together.
We helped them shift from reactive operations to structured delivery. By implementing a PMO model grounded in clear governance, integrated planning, and embedded ownership, they gained alignment across functions. Leaders operated with greater autonomy. Reporting was streamlined. Timelines stabilised.
The result was measurable: more structure, greater clarity, and faster execution.
Building the Conditions for Scale
Sustainable growth doesn’t happen by adding more people. It happens by building better systems.
That starts with an operating model designed for replication, not reaction. It means:
- Clearly defined decision rights
- Planning frameworks that forecast and adapt
- Delivery rhythms that standardise execution
- Team structures that embed process into onboarding, communication, and learning
Delays, rework, or communication gaps don’t just cost time, but also stall entire projects.
The Productivity Commission points to fragmented regulation, small firm sizes, and project-based contracting as persistent barriers to innovation and scale. With fewer than 5% of firms adopting prefabrication or advanced data systems, much of the industry still lacks the infrastructure to deliver at pace.
But systems can be built.
When your operations are structured with foresight and intent, you don’t rely on firefighting. You deliver with clarity, consistency, and confidence.
At Shivendra & Co, we help infrastructure and energy businesses move from patchwork operations to scalable delivery systems.
If your team is growing faster than your systems, let’s build the foundation that keeps delivery ahead of demand.
Resources
Australian Productivity Commission. (2025, February). Housing construction productivity: Can we fix it? https://www.pc.gov.au/research/completed/housing-construction/housing-construction.pdf
Deloitte Access Economics. (2025, March). New year, same challenges for Australia’s housing market. https://www.deloitte.com/au/en/services/economics/blogs/new-year-same-challenges-australia-housing-market.html
BMD Materials. (2025, March). The hidden cost of outdated communication in construction. https://www.bmdmaterials.com/bmdblog/the-hidden-cost-of-outdated-communication-in-construction
Accounting Times. (2023, August). Poor productivity the biggest issue for construction sector. https://www.accountingtimes.com.au/profession/poor-productivity-the-biggest-issue-for-construction-sector