I'm almost a year in to a job where I was given this task with no admin access on my local windows machine, with a team that had never used an IDE or git before, and with only Google Drive as my allowed cloud tool. When I got here everything was just a bunch of Jupyter notebooks that would get run in Google Collab that were stored haphazardly over a shared Google Drive.
It's been a slog, but Python for Windows, VSCode, Git for Windows, and Poetry can all be installed without admin access, and we got limited access to Azure DevOps. I've taught my team how to use powershell, git, VSCode, and Poetry, and taught them about testing and documentation (this is a slowwww process). We finally got a desktop computer with admin access this week that we can RDP into (that I requested basically right when I started), so we can run scheduled tasks on Windows and hack together some kind of a CI/CD system. We started a wiki on Azure, have most of our stuff documented and in a well organized monorepo, and track our work in boards now.
Now that other teams are starting to see how we're doing things, they want in, too. Thank god these people are wonderful and excited to learn because otherwise this would be very frustrating.
