Yeah this was my experience when I worked there. Driving goals and doing good work isn’t enough. You need a fancy project to demonstrate “expanded scope” otherwise your promo would get rejected.

Sometimes things worked the way you wanted and people got promoted doing their normal job. A lot of times though there were a lot of fancy projects built to get people promos that suckers got stuck with the bill on.

This ain’t a case of one dude scamming the system as much as it is institutional rot from red tape.