At a previous employer, they used to have this process where they would classify each project as being in active development or being in maintenance, and even the tiniest bit of development work required the "initiation" of a "project" with budget planning and approvals.

At the time I dismissed it as a bureaucratic process invented by the company; after all, they had no dearth of leaders adding bureaucracy to systems for the purpose of empire-building and, to a lesser extent, asserting self-importance. However, upon reading about Section 174, it made some sense, and I wonder whether they might just get around to removing these processes.