The amount of waste in human energy & effort in pointless jobs that optimise for "being busy" is, as far as 1st-world problems are concerned, a humanitarian tragedy.
You could nuke most of these organisations to dust and all that really would happen would be an adjustment as everyone realises the complicated TPS reports weren't very useful anyway and the world keeps turning.
There are some areas where there’s an argument to be made about cost effectiveness, but experience has demonstrated to me that if you’re retaining the services of groups in these firms that you realistically could afford much better service from somewhere else. Like direct hiring for the talent you need or recruiting your own contractors, working with vendors directly, etc.
I’ve never seen results from these firms that make me go “oh wow! That’s worth what was paid!”
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. For my experiences, I’ve just never seen it.
The work being done by that team was utterly pointless. It was a software deployment that had failed twice already because they hadn't followed the procedure in the manual, and were trying the same guaranteed-to-fail process a third time just in case it would succeed. They all knew it would fail, but their manager insisted they go through the motions anyway, for 12+ hours a day, 7 days a week. The manager knew it wouldn't work either, but his boss had signed some document that basically said that they "had to" do things this way. His boss had no idea about anything, wasn't there, and didn't care about the technical details to begin with.
It was an incredible farce, with deadly consequences, for no tangible results.