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—— 15 OCTOBER 2026
A tight talent market and an uncertain pipeline: how should practices structure their delivery teams?
3 min read · Includes a real conversation with an Adelaide-based architectural director
You hire. Then the project doesn’t come.
The fee proposal is in, the client seems keen, and everything points to the project moving forward.
Your team is already committed to other projects, so you bring someone new onboard, knowing they’ll need time to get up to speed.
Then the project stalls. An approval drags, a client decision slips, or the start date keeps moving.
Now you’ve got a new salary commitment, a new team member to integrate, and no certainty about when the work will begin.
The challenge isn’t just finding the right people. It’s knowing when to commit.
The challenge of hiring in an uncertain market
There are risks on both sides.
Hire too early, and you’re carrying additional permanent staff while waiting for projects to start.
Wait until everything is confirmed, and you could be recruiting at short notice just as several projects land at once.
But when project start dates are difficult to predict, the question becomes:
How do you build a team that’s ready when projects move, but not stretched when they stall?
A conversation with an architectural director
I recently spoke with Chris, a director at a 20-person practice in Adelaide specialising in education and commercial work, who was trying to recruit a project architect.
Finding someone with the right experience was taking longer than expected.
“It’s very hard to hire good people, particularly when you need them now.”
Chris wasn’t looking to move away from building an internal team.
He wanted to invest in his people, give them consistent project experience and help them develop.
But he also recognised that project demands can change faster than a practice can recruit.
“We need to be able to swell and contract and everything.”
And recruitment itself takes time that directors don’t always have.
“We don’t have the time to do that. Because things do change quite quickly.”
It’s not about choosing between permanent employees and external support. It’s about building a capable internal team while having options to respond when workloads shift without warning.
Aligning project demands with your team’s strengths
Different project stages place different demands on your team.
Design development may require more involvement from senior architects, while construction documentation can include defined packages that an experienced delivery team can take on.
So when a delayed project suddenly gets the green light, the question isn’t always whether you need to hire more people.
It might be whether some of your existing workload can be allocated differently.
Before making your next resourcing decision, consider:
01 Where is your team’s experience most needed?
02 Which documentation packages could be delivered with additional support?
03 What work needs to keep moving if project priorities change?
Building flexibility into project delivery
This is where having an established project delivery partner can make a difference.
Rather than pulling key people away from existing commitments when a new project starts, defined documentation packages can be allocated to an experienced team working within your practice’s systems and standards.
Your internal team retains ownership of design decisions, client relationships and technical oversight, while additional delivery capacity helps keep documentation progressing.
Of course, this still requires clear scopes, proper briefing, communication and review.
That’s why it pays to establish those working relationships before you’re under pressure.
When priorities shift, you’re not starting from scratch trying to find people, explain your standards and work out how to collaborate.
You can’t control when projects move forward. But you can prepare your team to respond when they do.