Once upon a time in a galaxy far far away, there was a development process called Waterfall. In this development process, your project progressed in a step by step process.
1. Initiation - One pager
2. Planning - Scope Document
3. Requirements - Requirements Document
4. Design - Design Document
5. Test - Test cases and Test plan
6. Deployment
At every stage of your project was a stage gate where you would present your project in front of the PMO with leadership. In this meeting you would walk your way through your project and at the end of your session, you would hopefully have a green light to move to the next phase of your project. Most of the time, you would be required to have all of your sign offs from the previous phase before you moved on to your next phase. Waterfall lent itself very well to this process in that it was a step driven development cycle. The problem with this process was that you might not find out until Design that your project could only afford 5 of the 10 deliverables. Also you might not find out until Design that you really needed to include additional scope that you didn't know about in the planning phase. Easily corrected with a CR and additional funding but another problem nonetheless. The other problem was getting people to sign off on a project that they really knew little about but they owned that sign off. So I think that depending on your organization and how large it is, you might not really get the business involvement that you seek unless you are diligent about your communication.
