[swearwolf]

You need someone who gives a shit with the power to spend money. That's pretty much it. Every single year, a company costs more to operate than it did the year before. Every piece of software you buy costs more over time. Same thing with hardware. Same thing with leases. Same thing with desks, chairs, trash cans, pencils, paper towels, and on and on. Yet I've watched many companies try to implement a "flat" budget, meaning no additional spend compared to the year before. Works fine if you've got room to cut, but do that over a long enough period of time (really not that long, two or three years max), and you'll end up with a situation where critical infrastructure is running on hardware that's so old it wouldn't survive a reboot or a gentle move from one rack to another. You can have great leaders up and down the chain, all of them saying, "Hey! This thing is probably going to break soon and it's going to ruin the whole year's sales forecast 'cause we won't be able to ship a damn thing!" but if that messages gets to the CFO, and they'd rather roll the dice on one more year of "lean" operation before they jump ship well...that's pretty much that.

Also, no company I've ever worked for makes their budget after asking people what they need. Instead, the Finance team just copy-pastes last year's budget, usually with a little haircut off the top for "efficiency." So let's say you run a team that depends on a handful of servers. You bought the current ones five years ago, and it cost $500k. Now it's time to replace them. But since you didn't buy $500k in servers last year, it's not in the budget for this year, so now your entirely reasonable request is being scrutinized as "unplanned spend". Several times I've seen teams try to build a plan for the upcoming year, only to find that there's nobody to give it to, because the "budgeting process" is done in about a week's time, usually two or three weeks after the fiscal year starts and with commensurate effort.