This means the client can no longer decide to change the color of a button, or the look of a dialog without going through their own change control process. Or, at least that is the theoretical upswing of the deal.
What this also means is that I have personally - and solely - designed and coded the legislative drafting process for 4% of the legislatures in the United States. Woo! Go me! I have now done all the design and implementation code for Nevada and Kansas to create bill drafts and amendments.
What made it a more interesting and challenging process is that the word processor of choice was different for both states. Nevada was using MS Word 95 when I started the process there. I "completed" it when they were using Word 2003. I did that project as an employee, so the time constraints were not so particular.
In Kansas, the word processor of choice was OpenOffice.org's Writer. Of course, being a different word processor, all the tricks I had learned for Word were no longer effective. Incorporating critical processes from keyboard control to linking to a database for information extraction was significantly different working from Writer than it was working from Word. Each had both benefits and caveats, and at this point, I'd be hard pressed to really go out on a limb defending the use of one over the other. From the coding perspective, they both had elements that were easy to work with and abysmal patches that no amount of coding would make smooth.