Your Situation - You have a tough job. You have customers with vague and changing requirements, you work with budgets and schedule constraints that often are not aligned with reality, you experience volatility in project resources and changing priorities and probably face other issues as well. You can't solve all these challenges, but you can lessen the negative impacts on your projects and reduce some of the chaos for you and the team by applying a few common sense managing methods.
What To Do - Use resources from this site, modify them to best meet your needs. Build your PM skills, take seminars and courses to augment things you learn on projects. Accept the fact that managing a project is "real work" and you will need to expend "real time and energy" to do so. Offer to be part of an improvement team in your organization to make the environment better for all projects. Ask other PMs and your project team for ideas. Be aware that your management is typically facing many difficult issues everyday, so don't expect that they will have the time and energy needed to lead all improvement efforts. If management does not understand what challenges your projects face, tell them constructively, you want their support. If nothing is happening, take action yourself, many improvements start at your level and what works out well, you can share with others. Do something good, you might be surprised how easy it might be.
Thoughts for Project Managers