The calculus of FP&A staffing is shifting. Across project-intensive industries, finance leaders face a persistent tension: the expectation to deliver deeper analytical insight across more complex organizational structures, while operating within teams that rarely grow in proportion to business complexity.
A recent case profile from the construction sector illustrates this dynamic with particular clarity. Hourigan Construction, operating across 15 distinct business units, has structured its FP&A function around a three-person team leveraging integrated planning technology. The scale differential—managing financial planning for a multi-unit enterprise with a team that would seem modest for a single business unit—reflects a broader strategic reorientation occurring across project-based industries.
The Visibility Imperative in Project-Based Businesses
Construction and related project industries present distinctive FP&A challenges that amplify the cost of delayed financial insight. Project profitability is not determined at period-end; it is eroded or protected in real-time through decisions about labor deployment, material procurement, change order management, and resource allocation. When financial visibility lags operational reality by weeks or months, management loses the ability to intervene while corrective action remains feasible.
This visibility gap is not merely a reporting inefficiency. In industries where margin structures are compressed and project-level profitability varies significantly, delayed insight translates directly into reduced earnings. The challenge for finance leaders is not capturing data—it is compressing the time between operational event and financial recognition sufficiently to inform decision-making.
Rethinking FP&A Capacity
The conventional response to expanded business complexity has been FP&A team expansion. However, this approach carries hidden costs that extend beyond compensation expense. Larger finance teams introduce coordination overhead, increase the risk of process inconsistency across units, and often fragment analytical focus across routine reporting obligations.
The strategic alternative involves reconsidering the relationship between FP&A capacity and platform capability. When planning and consolidation processes are sufficiently automated and integrated, a smaller team can maintain continuous visibility across more organizational units than traditional staffing models would suggest. The constraint becomes not team size but platform sophistication and process design.
This reorientation has implications for FP&A talent strategy as well. Organizations operating with lean finance teams tend to select for generalists with strong systems aptitude, rather than specialists focused on discrete functional areas. The capability profile shifts from analytical execution toward analytical architecture and business partnership.
Implications for Finance Leaders
For executives evaluating their own FP&A operating models, several considerations emerge from this operational pattern.
First, the question of FP&A staffing should follow strategic clarity about planning integration and process efficiency, not precede it. Organizations that expand finance teams without addressing underlying process fragmentation often discover that headcount growth produces incremental reporting capacity rather than strategic insight capability.
Second, the construction case highlights a specific vulnerability common to project-intensive businesses: the gap between operational project management and financial planning. When job costing, labor tracking, and change order management operate in disconnected systems, FP&A teams spend disproportionate time on data assembly rather than analysis. Platform integration across these operational and financial domains is a prerequisite for lean FP&A models.
Third, the 15-business-unit configuration suggests that organizational complexity, while demanding, is not an insurmountable constraint for scaled finance operations. The limiting factor is typically not the number of reporting entities but the degree of process standardization achievable across them. Business units with divergent accounting treatments, planning cadences, or cost structures demand more FP&A attention regardless of platform capability.
Strategic Positioning of FP&A
Beyond operational efficiency, the lean FP&A model carries implications for how finance functions position themselves within the organization. When FP&A teams are relieved of intensive data assembly tasks through platform automation, their attention shifts toward interpretive and advisory activities—reading operational signals, challenging planning assumptions, and supporting management decision-making with financial perspective.
This positioning aligns FP&A more closely with strategic finance while reducing its operational footprint. For organizations that achieve this transition, the FP&A function becomes defined not by its reporting output but by its contribution to management effectiveness.
Closing Perspective
The construction industry's margin pressures have accelerated adoption of these operating patterns out of necessity. However, the underlying dynamic—complexity growth outpacing FP&A resource expansion—exists across sectors. Finance leaders navigating this challenge have a choice: continue building FP&A teams in proportion to business complexity, or redesign the operating model to achieve greater leverage from platform capability and process efficiency.
The path forward increasingly leads toward the latter. Organizations that make this transition thoughtfully position their finance functions for strategic influence; those that defer it risk FP&A teams that are perpetually reactive and perpetually stretched.