When I was developing the tool to do remote management of PictureTel videoconferencing systems, I set out the architecture and realized that I would never be able to complete the work alone. It had several pieces - a low-level library to do serial communication, a library on the low-end videoconferencing system to translate from the wire protocol to local multimedia method calls, libraries on the client to issue the appropriate wire protocol commands for each of the different models of video-conferencing system from a single input request, and a library to wrap all of that up with an OLE Automation + Events interface.

We had a need for developers. We also had several development teams whose work would be significantly delayed if they didn't have the remote management tools I was developing. If you have enough problems, they start solving each other. I talked with the managers of the groups and got each of them to lend me one developer from their team. Together we completed the work in less time than they would have been waiting if I had been left to do it myself. Everybody won.