The typical solution (although I am not a manager) is to bucket up staff until you reach some predetermined size (i.e., collate staff upwards in the hierarchy u

The typical solution (although I am not a manager) is to bucket up staff until you reach some predetermined size (i.e., collate staff upwards in the hierarchy until you reach something like 100 people). This still really only works if you have a large population doing similar work, and it just so happens that they're all divided into small teams. You probably need to still do level setting (e.g., this part of the org worked on a harder/easier problem than this other part of the org). Not an easy problem to solve.