Do you feel like the process described in this post is a facsimile of ITIL? Do you feel like ITIL is generally associated with repeated shipped product?
I can see my tone being snarky. Sorry for that. But yes, I can draw a ton of parallels between how the change management and RFC process (request for change in this case) is used by more traditional companies and the OP’s post. ITIL is no holy grail, far from it, but some things invented in enterprise IT in the 1980’s have a tendency to resurface in some guise or form years later.
Have to agree that this seems like a re-discovery of an already solved problem. Sometimes called architecture review, before new initiatives kick off.
I worked at a big, regulated, company that had a very strict change control process. Too many RFC's for implementations a week out were met with a response like "what! why did you buy/build a system to do X? We already have three systems that do that!!", but it was too late by then to rethink x. The problem was it's difficult to deny a plane in the air permission to land - it's coming down eventually, like it or not. So we implemented an architecture review board that was "permission to take off", hopefully before sinking a lot of money and time into something, run the idea around past some connected folks. It was default approve - someone could raise an objection and ask for more information, but if there were collective shrugs, you were good to go.
