I hear you, I work for a large manufacturing company as a lead engineer (household name in the UK) and this complete lack of agreement between teams on how to do things results in a colossal amount of churn/wastage between "new shiny" and "already working".
Lots of "Lets move X to Y" which never gets completed then someone addes "Z" and now you have 3 ways of doing basically everything.
Worse is our documentation (which is generally good) frequently documents X but not Y or Z because the person who decided on Y or Z didn't look.
It's mentally fatiguing, I feel like every choice on what to use comes with more trade-offs than I should have to consider for something so simple.
Video conferencing is a good example, We variously have Hangouts, Skype and others, teleconferencing equipment in one room is one thing, in another something else.
The only reliable way to throw video to a screen is a USB-C to HDMI cable I keep in my rucksack.
Feels like half my decisions are saying "No" to an engineer who wants to replace Foo with a very shiny but 99% identical and unknown Bar.
I've worked with both sides of this argument and I find that "new shiny" is a perpetual problem. Anyone that proposes new shiny should be responsible of showing trade offs, integration feasibility, impact, etc.
I'm not against new technology but so many people want to adopt new technology X just for the sake of it being new technology X. I see this on developer teams I work with every day and it makes me want to gouge my eyes out sometimes, especially when I end up being forced to use their nonsensical choice of new technology X which makes my life harder.
Part of the problem I believe is that everyone is focusing on their own self-interest. Many developers for the most part don't care much about the business interests/growth. They're already looking for their next higher paying gig and want paid training in technology X at their current gig. Since many businesses provide little concern for long term talent retition, loyalty or investing in professional development that falls outside their business adopted technology preview, I completely understand the developers choosing themselves over the business. At the same time, going overboard shoots yourself in the foot because it strangles the business in the process.
There certainly needs to be a balance and a lot could be gained by giving developers freetime and resources for continued professional development.
I have a plan to put them off without the harsh "No" - require anyone proposing X be responsible for documenting X before it's put into 'production', if they want it that badly that they are willing to do that then I'd have more faith it's something useful and not "oooh the shiny" - worst case at least it's documented.
At my very large company, in my particular department, any one trouble ticket may bounce between
(1) a Java ticketing app
(2) a web/email ticketing system
(3) a Jira issue, or
(4) a Gitlab issue, or
(5) a company-wide issue tracker
Other groups (e.g., customer service) have their own, completely separate systems besides the above.
Some development tasks are tracked with an issue tracker. Others are planned out in Confluence or Jira, per the whims of each team. We have literally 5 different chat "solutions," with various factions preferring each. Every day it seems someone brings online yet another script that sends out helpful emails. My count is around 16k since Jan 1.
The result of all of this is a sprawling, utterly insane flood of useless noise that everyone ignores.
Lots of "Lets move X to Y" which never gets completed then someone addes "Z" and now you have 3 ways of doing basically everything.
Worse is our documentation (which is generally good) frequently documents X but not Y or Z because the person who decided on Y or Z didn't look.
It's mentally fatiguing, I feel like every choice on what to use comes with more trade-offs than I should have to consider for something so simple.
Video conferencing is a good example, We variously have Hangouts, Skype and others, teleconferencing equipment in one room is one thing, in another something else.
The only reliable way to throw video to a screen is a USB-C to HDMI cable I keep in my rucksack.
Feels like half my decisions are saying "No" to an engineer who wants to replace Foo with a very shiny but 99% identical and unknown Bar.