One of the drivers for setting up the MMG in the first place was to work on sharing best practices and getting an idea at the kinds of things we could share.
The scale of our legacy is one issue, larger institutions have larger legacies to manage. At Aston, it may be more manageable given the type of collection we have and the number of records. In other places, this is clearly not the case. I think Corrine has already pointed out that Leicester has 100 years' worth of legacy! However, if we can show that certain types of project work, and work at scale then maybe we can help each other to justify our projects to our managers.
I am fairly lucky in so far as my current manager recruited me to the post precisely to address the issues of 20+ years of neglect in metadata practice and so I can put my time and energy into projects. However, each time I do anything I do run through the time commitments and resources that will go into these projects and work through the logic of doing metadata enhancement. Saying that we need to conform our data to international standards e.g. NACO, SACO, RDA, MARC21 etc. are all good selling points.