without standardised practices and processes holding up the fort, the actual implementation turned to chaos, with haphazard disjointed approaches being taken by all

This is actually why I advised my son, who aspires to be an entrepreneurial owner / manager of multiple businesses, that his ideal job out of college would be to work for a large company (i.e. thousands of employees) for about 5 years or so, and pay careful attention to their processes. You cannot scale a business without solid, robust processes -- no matter how good the product or service.

And, that's what he is doing. He's working for a software company with 10k+ employees. I have no doubt that he may someday be running his own business (or multiple businesses) with 10k+ employees.