As an engineering manager and later a director, a regular and often difficult task was assigning ROI to projects that had recognizable but diffuse impact. It's easy to calculate a dollar figure for certain projects by projecting additional conversions or revenue. It's harder for a security or SRE project that doesn't have a direct impact on those things, but can help reduce risk or empower a bunch of other teams to operate more safely or move more quickly.

I have been working on a set of tools and standard formulas that can be applied to these cases and demonstrate a more accurate view of a team's or department's overall ROI. The plan is to open-source the bulk of it, but provide a hosted service for folks who don't want to manage it themselves.