Being a person who believes in continual improvement, and being proactive instead of reactive, I suggested to one of my employers that I worked for that we should implement
ELMAH (Exception Logging For .NET) to handle our uncaught exceptions. They weren't too interested when I made the suggestion and so I did not push it. I had found this gem of code
here because I spend a bit of time each day
doing research and improving my skills. (see point 2)
However, we had this continuing problem where customers would have a problem with the .NET site, maybe they had a crash and we had no way to diagnose the crash other than to remote into their machine and try to reproduce the error. What made it worse is that they had debug mode off, and we could not even see the exact crash details. Often we would have to take a risk and modify their file to put debug on (I say take a risk because if you make enough modifications, the application will restart and kick everybody off the system) and this was a live site with real customers.
So once the problem was large enough that it was passed on to the development manager. When he queried the team for possible solutions to that particular crash, I
jumped at the opportunity to suggest ELMAH. The sale was immediately closed, and within a week we had ELMAH up and running on some of our customers.
Lesson? Wait for the right time to make your suggestions. it can be very effective. Otherwise your advice may be falling on deaf ears.
Also.. this had the same result again when the timing was right we were able to successfully convince our development manager to make the switch from SourceSafe to Subversion. We had discussed it many times but we had to wait for just the right time and when this time came (since they already knew about it and liked it, but were just waiting for a good time), getting approval from management was easy as pie.