I saw two projects in a row in a German Fintech (the one that has AI in its name that forbids usage of AI) go exactly the same way. Two/three months to code ev

I saw two projects in a row in a German Fintech (the one that has AI in its name that forbids usage of AI) go exactly the same way. Two/three months to code everything ("It's maximum priority!"), about four to QA, and then about a year to deploy to individual country services by ops team. During test and deploy phases, the developers were just twiddling thumbs because ops refused to allow them access and product refused to take in new projects due to possibility of developers having to go back to code. It took the CEO to intervene and investigate the issues, and the CTO's college best friend that was running DevOps was demoted.