The inevitable failure of traditional large scale projects leads us into this circle, a circle that everyone in software development has seem to some extent, and into which you can enter at any point and know exactly what is coming next.
The circle is almost always the result of managements need to put more and more control around a failed project, because it failed. Their only solution to the problem is to require finer grained visibility, more reports, more checkpoints, ultimately missing the point of the failure, but if they are not seen to act on the failure then this is also seen as a problem.