I am certain someone has studied this in great detail. Still, after dealing with, what I invariably experience as Kafkan project management in big companies for a while now, it perplexes me how inefficiently they appear to work.

Take say 14 people, and suppose you have 3 pieces of standard nerdery work to do, including project planning, management, etc. What would be the most efficient way of organizing these people, and attacking the assignments?

The way all big companies go about doing this would in my experience be to build a pyramid hierarchy with say 1 person in the top with overall responsibility, perhaps 3 business type middle managers with budget, schedule, etc. responsibilities, 6 project managers with more administrative tasks, and 4 nerds to do the actual coding, design etc. Graphical design would typically be done by an external agency.

Now why is it done like this, and – are there really no other more efficient ways in large organizations?