The biggest culprit I've seen for this kind of bloat is reporting requirements. Senior leadership is often perceived as wanting to see burndown charts and other numerical progress indicators. These reports are then presented to leadership, and then leadership reacts to seeing the burndown as flat, have a giant spike at the end, or go the opposite direction. Good leadership will of course ask for corrective actions, as clearly one of their teams is struggling, and then the team/manager will come up with more complex workflows to help clarify progress.

In practice I've found a 2-3 sentence update for each project on what's been achieved for any given project on the team and what's happening next is more than sufficient. Bonus points for capturing the highlights and action items from the retro. You'll still get questions/kudos for progress, but its easier to discuss the root causes without reaching for the "process change" tool.