I was in a knot of people like this. We spontaneously organized a software engineering quality team out of ourselves. We bribed one of the IT people for the admin password to a desktop PC they failed to deprovision after firing a guy (a case of an admin's favorite beer is worth at least 10x the retail price in terms of bribing power). We setup a rogue server on it for source control and ticket tracking. By the time anyone figured out why we were generating high quality documentation and fulfilling our few assignments in record time, we had a full-blown lifecycle management process of our own. By the time anyone figured out what they should do about it, we had our own ERP system that integrated with and automated most of the excruciatingly repetitive tasks their Salesforce-based system made us do. We were so hyperproductive over everyone else on the company's own business tasks that they couldn't ignore it anymore and they adopted our systems and practices.

And then they fucked it up by adding a bunch of top-down, manufacturing oriented process, but by that point I was able to find another position and Gee the Eff Oh. At least my skills didn't stagnate, and I didn't have a sword hanging over my head on one of my personal projects.