The problem is that IT departments often fall into two areas - understaffed, or having a motherload of work to get through (Putting IT in the driving seat for business success, sandrasmith.computing.co.uk).

My department would not appreciate having to do projects that are not really our responsibility, because we do not have the resources to spare. We prefer to use the IT director as the bottleneck for all work coming into the department, so at that point we can start to apply project management constraints.

For example, "we can do that for you, but we don't have the resource for another two weeks" or "you can have X, but it is incompatible with Y, so which one is more important?"

Then, when a piece of work becomes a project, we have control of it from the start, and we can impose a realistic deadline to begin with, rather than have one  pushed upon us.

Jesus Horatio Hernandez