The IT department bottlenecks progress. How should I handle this? I'm currently working as a PhD student.

I am not working on a tech-oriented PhD. However, my project requires a lot of programming. This involves both working on a computation cluster, servers, and working with a variety of software. These are provided and maintained by our faculty IT support.

Now on the reason why I post: the first problems started when working on our server, maintained by our IT staff. I required some software essential to do my work, but because I have no administrator rights, I cannot install what I need. I asked IT very politely (I'm the new one after all), and they let me know that they would handle it as soon as possible.

Two weeks later, I still did not have access to the software I desperately needed to do my work. I had to ask my promotor (luckily a huge help in this matter) to ask IT, and finally the software was installed.

The following cycle continued until now:


I notice that software is missing / outdated / not working properly
I ask IT to fix the issue, because no other options are available
IT ignores my requests, leading to me having difficulties to meet deadlines
Someone with better credentials has to pressure IT into fixing the issue


Like I mentioned earlier, I absolutely love programming and computers in general, so I can fix almost all issues myself. However, my hands are tied because I have no administrator rights, and IT goes to great lengths to avoid that a non-IT person does something / installs something on one of the computers...

Does some here have similar experiences, and do you know how to smoothen this out? I obviously don't want to cause a ruckus in our department, but I also believe it to be unfair that we are blocked from doing our job. I'm not the only employee who was bottlenecked by IT, so I guess all suggestions are welcome!
This is a partial solution I've used myself, and it assumes a few things: 


You access your clusters remotely through a connection (like other answers pointed, cloud servers or remote), so where you work isn't exactly the bottleneck. 
The software you use isn't OS dependent or has any special licenses
You do not have a ton of things hooked up from serial ports to measuring equipment and whatnot.




One thing I've done in this situation is, when you finally grab a ticket from IT, ask them to install a virtual machine like VirtualBox and have them enable virtualization in the BIOS. Most processors allow this nowadays. Make sure they install it properly or they will ghost again.

This basically allows you to install any Linux distribution you want (you need Licenses for Windows images), so it is an operating system where you have all admin rights. This completely removes the IT middleman if your case is just coding and clustering the data crunching since you don't need their permission to do things in the VM, and also shouldn't impact performance significantly. 

If IT is worth half a dime, they will appreciate the solution, since:


It takes gargantuan effort to compromise the Host Machine through a VM if you are not malicious
Resulting lack of tickets from you needing something updated/installed.


Worst case scenario you can still alternate between both Operating Systems, and do small things in the VM with your admin rights.