When an organization stands up a center to run its transformation, the staffing decision is almost always the same, and almost always wrong. It hires for capacity: a team of coordinators to chase status, fill templates, and keep the plan tidy. The instinct is understandable. It is also the precise opposite of what the job needs.
Coordination scales the wrong thing
A large coordinating team gets very good at the activity that justifies its size. More people means more templates, more chasing, more cadence: a machine that produces visibility and consumes everyone else's time. It feels productive because it is busy. But none of that motion clears a blocker or forces a stuck decision. You have scaled the part of the work that was never the bottleneck.
A transformation center is not measured by how much it can track. It is measured by how much it can move. Those need very different people.
Seniority is the actual lever
The work that matters in the center is unglamorous and hard: walking into a contested priority and resolving it, getting two executives who avoid each other to decide, killing a project that has friends. None of that is junior work. It needs standing, scar tissue, and the credibility to be heard in the room. One senior operator who can change a stalled situation is worth a dozen coordinators who can describe it beautifully.
Small is a feature, not a constraint
A small center is forced to be ruthless about what it touches, which is exactly the discipline you want. It cannot own everything, so it owns the few cross-cutting problems no one else can. It cannot chase every owner, so it makes owners accountable instead. The constraint does the prioritizing a larger team would happily avoid.
If you are sizing the center, resist the headcount instinct. Make it smaller than feels safe and more senior than feels affordable. The cheap version is the one you pay for in delivery.