It sounds like you have not been in the position of leading a development team before. As a result you are suffering from the same mistake that I made myself wh

It sounds like you have not been in the position of leading a development team before. As a result you are suffering from the same mistake that I made myself when moving into that situation. Stop asking your boss for permission to do every technical task. As a developer this was appropriate but when running a team it is not. It sounds like your boss is viewing the development team as he should, it's a sausage factory. He cares about the output but has no real interest of what happens to produce it. As he will not let you dedicate fixed time now to make changes you need instead to gradually introduce them. Set a goal of getting all the process changes you want made over the space of the next year. For example, add some automatic monitoring. Don't ask for permission, just go ahead and go it because it is a small task. Once it is working well you then get the three other developers to start using it. Once everyone sees the benefit over the next few weeks you can then make another change.