Working at the Speed of Mistakes
Normally, I like the fast-paced environment that I work in, but every now and then it becomes clear to me that there's someone asleep at the wheel. Meaning, they are so focused on the next six weeks (for instance) that they forget to look past that and realize that as soon as this short-term thing is done, it's not going to stop the problem, it'll only make it worse. Take 24hr processing.
If we have one system that's 24hr, then they're going to say "Hey, nice, but we can't blank, and we have to be able to do that!" So solving one problem by making it available 24hrs is not really solving anything - it's causing the next thing to become the 'problem'. Then, when they have that second thing, the users will say "Yeah, that's better, but what we want is blank." and it'll continue until everything runs 24hrs a day and had they just stopped and realized that in the beginning, then we could have saved a lot of time and trouble by designing the solution that will make everything work that way.
Trying to do this piecemeal is not the answer. Everyone involved would agree if they stepped back enough to look at the issues really driving these decisions. But they won't. It's enough to say "They asked for x, we'll give them x." and then move on.
So it's going to be a messy year as more band-aids are applied to systems that don't really need them if the systems driving them were working 24hrs, and they'll eventually have to because the users will pick them off one by one until they have them all running that way. But they won't fess up that's what they want, so it's band-aids.
Yeah... it's going to be ugly for a while.