I have seen shops with literally hundreds of people doing makework because they have a model of maintaining permanent development teams, whether there are approved projects or not.

Do you have developers (solutions) types also? Most of the opportunities I see there are never picked up, leaving it to the Infrastructure types to do the heavy lifting.

Make your staff complement consist as much as possible of a small team of highly flexible self-motivated and committed people who do everything (and have them cross-train each other so they can do each others’ jobs). Make them partners with you in solving problems and making decisions. Yes, that means explain and persuade rather than dictate, listen carefully, and be wiling to let what you hear affect what you decide. If you do this right, your staff will stay. Avoid as much as possible staff who have to “be trained”: you need staff that learn and adapt on their own initiative.

Drop all vendors outright except those absolutely needed, and of those vendors you keep, go as far down-market as you can (e.g. replace Cisco with Netgear), and use open-source software whenever you can. Rely on your highly flexible IT team to make it work. Take all inexpensive steps to ameliorate risk.

Replace maintenance contracts with your own on-site sparing, and use commodity hardware everywhere, standardizing on a few key pieces out of which you build everything (like lego). Test prospective commodity hardware pieces yourself before adopting it for use: not everything works as advertised. When you find something that does work, buy as much of it as you can. Have a failure response plan in place for every key piece of gear, including knowing where the spare is, and where the spare for the spare is.

Okay… so am I doing these things now? Yes, I am. It can be scary, but it works.