I've done special projects at a large, somewhat stodgy company, and the general pattern was that you had about nine months to do good work, just engineering and

I've done special projects at a large, somewhat stodgy company, and the general pattern was that you had about nine months to do good work, just engineering and business folks together, after which point the "project management office" would get their hooks into it, and any further scheduled meetings would be prevented from achieving anything productive in deference to the new project manager's interest in gantt charts.