> Everything certainly took longer in the new company, dealing with centralised, barely informed non-stakeholders who still had red tape in place to get anythin

> Everything certainly took longer in the new company, dealing with centralised, barely informed non-stakeholders who still had red tape in place to get anything done, along with a strong impulse to just copy other teams rather than come up with a solution that cleanly and effectively solves the problem. Yes. The last place I worked was a UK organisation that had around 5000 staff, many of whom were software engineers. The org was divided into 5 or so different divisions, each of which had its own customers, sales teams, PMs, etc. Crucially, each division had its own resourcing function, so new projects could exploit local knowledge to find engineers who had domain knowledge, and could even consider career development opportunities when picking staff for new bids/projects ('Fred is interested in trying this, he's not a perfect fit but is competent and motivated to learn'). Anyway, a new CEO (who himself had an engineering background) joined the organisation and apparently in an early meeting asked 'how many engineers do we have across the company?'. Nobody actually knew. So after a while he started an initiative to launch a company wide resource management process. Although well intentioned, it was a disaster. We ended up with global resource managers who didn't actually know any of the people concerned. A lot of our work was specialised engineering (e.g. simulation development, signal processing, etc) and it proved impossible to develop a global skills framework with all of the right categories. After a very painful year, bid teams and projects reverted to local resourcing to find the staff who had relevant skills and domain knowledge. I'm not against standardizing things across organisations (indeed, my main function was trying to drive technical commonality) but like optimization, you have to choose the right things to standardize, and the right things to leave untouched.