"I certainly have found myself looking for other employment when the amount of fire-fighting time exceeds the amount of enhancement time."

That's every job I've ever had except my current one.

I finally understood it when I read an article on "technical debt". Any technical project involves some compromising. You always have something that can't get done by the deadline. No project management in the world can solve that.

The question is, what do you do after the deadline? How do you find the time to pay the technical debt. Whatever it is, call it a project, hire more staff, give the programmers "free" time, I don't really care anymore, as long as it is somehow addressed.

Currently, we err on the side of spending a lot of time in the testing phase. To a fault in my opinion, where people are actually idle. We're public sector and some how we get away with it. We are starting to feel some backlash as departments begin to buy 3rd party software rather than deal with our slow turnaround. But our systems are very stable, so it's a solution some sense.