Hmmm. I've never seen anything like that. Basically, I've attended meetings where we discussed design issue between engineers in order to formulate a design. We drafted documents, had more meetings in order to review those documents, then finally agreed to a design. We invited QA and architects, who then reviewed our design and test plans. We then finally agreed on all of that and proceeded to code. We had code reviews, then agreed that the code was good. The code was checked into the version control system, yada, yada, yada...
As far as conferences, we didn't really go to any, although I suppose we could have if we would have had the time. We never did as we were too busy going to meetings and writing code. Financial matters were in the realm of upper management, and we didn't really have to worry about any of that at the time. I was involved with technologies such as telecommunications and defense systems.