From personal experience I can confirm that this is exactly how it works when governments try to do things. There's such a compulsive need to negate risk that everything is all about the process instead of the results - and inevitably this leads to huge amounts of wasted time and money while people try to decide the right thing to do.
On a previous project for a very large automaker, it took me 5 full days plus a 1 week trip to 4 cities in China to change a single graphic. (The rational was that they wanted the client to talk directly with the engineers instead of having to go through all the corporate bureaucracy. So much for that. ;)
Replacing the logo itself took all of about 30 minutes (receive new picture, digitally retouch, overlay onto background image, resize, play around with transparency, save to png.)
Also, bear in mind, the 400 hours is 400 man-hours, which is a cumulative number based on the number of people involved. If you've never done business with government, let me assure you, it was a lot more people than necessary.
Absolutely. The man hours can easily pile up when you do a conf call with a half dozen folks where majority of them are on mute 90% of the time.
I recently did contract work for an agency and had instances where a simple spacing or image resizing took days of work because the client or the agency would understand and then forget that I must crop and/or resize images for them all to be of one size.
