The team has grown from managing eight relationships to fourteen. The spreadsheet hasn't changed. Neither has the process, the meeting cadence, or who's responsible for what. Nobody made an active decision to keep everything the same, it simply never came up for review, because nothing has broken badly enough yet to force the question.

The strain shows up first as workload, one or two people quietly carrying more relationships than the original model assumed, before it shows up as risk. New partners get onboarded using a process built for a different, smaller portfolio, because it's the only process that exists, whether or not it actually fits.

This is rarely visible from the outside until it isn't. The organisation looks like it's managing its alliance function fine, right up until the volume finally exceeds what the structure was ever designed to hold, and something starts slipping that nobody had capacity to catch.

Signs this is happening

• The alliance operating model hasn't been reviewed since the portfolio was meaningfully smaller
• One or two people currently hold disproportionate responsibility across the growing portfolio
• Onboarding a new partner means adapting a process that wasn't built for it
• Workload, rather than portfolio risk, currently decides where alliance attention goes

This condition rarely appears alone. It's frequently paired with the same issue sitting unresolved every quarter, since a model stretched past its design tends to produce exactly that symptom first.

What it points to

This reflects a Structural gap, an operating model built for a smaller ecosystem than the one it now manages. The Alliance Operating Model Review tests whether structures, processes and capacity still match the scale of what's actually being managed.

Not sure this is exactly your situation?