In the last few years, some of the gains I've made toward making my role more focused on long-term efforts to continually improve and standardize our systems have been rolled back. The organizational details are boring and immaterial to the story; it boils down to the fact my team has less people to do more work, so much more of my time must be spent dealing with the churn of my team's daily duties. As a result, all parts of my job have suffered, and not just in obvious ways. My primary frustration with this situation is IT systems are entropic. They are constantly changing, and without clear and enforced policies, they get more chaotic as they grow. For a couple years, I felt like I was really making progress toward bringing my company's domains to an acceptable level of standardization, many of which we took over after their previous owners failed an audit or were essentially told to give us the reigns because we were better equipped for managing the services associated w...