IT people are notoriously bad at explaining technology issues in business terms. So it should be no surprise when the people funding the projects don’t want to spend money on things that sound like gibberish to them. There are real product gaps that they want fixed and they have no time for “cleaning up technical debt” or “doing automation” or “upgrading framework X to version 2”.
Until we learn to explain the value of technical things in business terms, we should stop being surprised that they don’t want to fund it.
What specific piece of technical debt do you want to fix and what is the business impact to that? What specific thing do you want to automate and how will that benefit the people paying for the work?
Will it lower risk? Will it increase revenue? Will it give more capability to the people using the product? Will it address known problems with the system that are annoying users?
There is business value to all of this and yet if we can’t explain it, it won’t get done.
