Scenario

You're advising an engineering leader who needs to decide whether a proposed initiative should get funded. The work could improve reliability, speed, cost, or future delivery capacity, but the benefits are not always obvious in the same way as a revenue feature. Leadership wants a clear way to compare the upside, cost, and risk before committing resources.

Question

How do you evaluate whether an engineering initiative is worth the investment?

A useful way to ground this is a manufacturing and supply chain setting. For example, an initiative to modernize the Kraft Heinz plant data ingestion and reporting stack might reduce downtime, improve forecast accuracy, lower cloud spend, or shorten the cycle time for releasing analytics used by operations teams.