Management. Business Analysts. "Metawork" in the words of a coworker who used to architect BPM implementations at the parent corporation of my job. Getting consensus from possibly hundreds of stakeholders.
Generally, the disconnect is that management is under the assumption that you can manage your way to success, so they add more overhead to watch and prod at the proceedings. Development is almost always an afterthought in most business projects. The first thing they do? Get consensus, which is generally everyone putting in ideas so that they seem involved—see Atwood's Duck[1]. After you have a ton of often contradictory ideas, you need to have them prioritized. And since nobody managing the project is technical, they need to hold countless "prioritization meetings with stakeholders and implementers." Often times the meetings will grind to a standstill while process analysts and engineers argue over the wording of things. Usually the analyst will tell the engineer that the business has standardized on a set of terms, of which are not the trade names for things. Maybe everyone uses a set of terms which aren't the "correct" wording.
After things are prioritized based on the wrong criteria, they're then pushed off to an engineering group who are tasked with implementing things exactly to spec. Since the definitions are incorrect, they need to constantly circle back and check with the stakeholders to double check. Occasionally checking in will involve a "subject matter expert" who is on vacation, and the only one allowed to answer the question. (Thus stalling that item and anything depending on it.) Others will often say "it's above my paygrade" in an attempt to avoid culpability.
After the project has run long and only has a majority of the features complete, people are reassigned to other projects, and the app is sent to QA to hand-test features. Sometimes it will involve the "stakeholders" sitting in a room for days or weeks, manually clicking their way through the interface. Maybe the project is declared a boondoggle, deleted, and replaced with someone else's pet project.
So yes, not logical.
1: http://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/
Generally, the disconnect is that management is under the assumption that you can manage your way to success, so they add more overhead to watch and prod at the proceedings. Development is almost always an afterthought in most business projects. The first thing they do? Get consensus, which is generally everyone putting in ideas so that they seem involved—see Atwood's Duck[1]. After you have a ton of often contradictory ideas, you need to have them prioritized. And since nobody managing the project is technical, they need to hold countless "prioritization meetings with stakeholders and implementers." Often times the meetings will grind to a standstill while process analysts and engineers argue over the wording of things. Usually the analyst will tell the engineer that the business has standardized on a set of terms, of which are not the trade names for things. Maybe everyone uses a set of terms which aren't the "correct" wording.
After things are prioritized based on the wrong criteria, they're then pushed off to an engineering group who are tasked with implementing things exactly to spec. Since the definitions are incorrect, they need to constantly circle back and check with the stakeholders to double check. Occasionally checking in will involve a "subject matter expert" who is on vacation, and the only one allowed to answer the question. (Thus stalling that item and anything depending on it.) Others will often say "it's above my paygrade" in an attempt to avoid culpability.
After the project has run long and only has a majority of the features complete, people are reassigned to other projects, and the app is sent to QA to hand-test features. Sometimes it will involve the "stakeholders" sitting in a room for days or weeks, manually clicking their way through the interface. Maybe the project is declared a boondoggle, deleted, and replaced with someone else's pet project.
So yes, not logical.
1: http://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/