Ha, had even this fail once ar an old job during the win 7 to win 10 migration. No budget to replace 8yr old desktops? Fine, give me $50/each for SSD. Worked out to around 50k, went to director of IT with a laundry list of benefits, including saving 1mil in total replacement costs.
Nope, denied. Dude had his eye on a non existent CIO role that he thought he could create by cutting everything to the bone. This failed because he was basically the least charismatic person possible, so he leaves. A new director came in, sees the problem, saw the huge savings I pitched and said "fuck yeah do it, and after this, we get on an actual 3yr replacement lifecycle" and we actually did.
You dont need good management to do things right, but boy howdy you do need to make sure you dont have bad management.
