I think that's just a typical big company bog that sorta forms at every company. It's a human thing, not a valley thing or anything like that.
I work in a small company, 3 or 4 devs, couple business ops guys, sales guy and head of company.
Even I decide sometimes "naw I'm just making the call on this so it is consistent and works" and don't bring anyone else in on things because it is time to just make a call.
At a big company, I can't imagine the scale of human involvement in every decision... just takes one idiot to gum up the works too.
We're working with one company now who is paying through the nose because we keep having meeting after meeting about the same things over and over and this company has a "meeting terrorist" (my term) who is absolutely determined to bring up the decisions from last meeting to start every meeting and re-debate everything for no reason at all. It's madness.
Yeah the dude straight up follows that manual. It's uncanny ...
He even raises the prospect that there are other people (never mentioned) who has concerns about his own idea ... and he's the only one to bring those issues up, and argues against his own ideas.
Dude is either incompetent to an insane degree or straight up sabotaging the company.
I met a project manager like this on a client implementation a few years ago.
The client felt they needed 7 phases (requirements gathering, analysis, design etc. etc.) - this is for a SaaS product but whatever!
They also felt there were 8 business areas that each needed to be treated separately (support staff, retail, warehouse, etc. etc.).
So the day after we signed the contract I came in to find my inbox bulging with 56 (i.e. 7 x 8) two-hour meeting invites from the meeting terrorist. There was one for each combo of phase and business area - e.g. a two hour meeting for requirements gathering for the support staff area, another for design for the warehouse area, and so on. There were no delays between phases.
Untangling that shitfest did not start the project out on a good footing.
I work in a small company, 3 or 4 devs, couple business ops guys, sales guy and head of company.
Even I decide sometimes "naw I'm just making the call on this so it is consistent and works" and don't bring anyone else in on things because it is time to just make a call.
At a big company, I can't imagine the scale of human involvement in every decision... just takes one idiot to gum up the works too.
We're working with one company now who is paying through the nose because we keep having meeting after meeting about the same things over and over and this company has a "meeting terrorist" (my term) who is absolutely determined to bring up the decisions from last meeting to start every meeting and re-debate everything for no reason at all. It's madness.