You know your teams have a clear picture of the business case when they communicate that they know what the cost of postponing an improvement activity is.
“If we don’t establish the traceability, we cannot handle more than 2 variants in the market, and we lose the turnover from the other 6 variants the market is demanding.”
“If we don’t improve the quality of the requirements from 6 to 8, we won’t beat the competitor on time to market due to excessive rework.”
“If we continue with the current level of quality, the revenue on the next version will be eaten up by quality issues.”
You want to hear these types of concerns being expressed besides the classic “meeting deadlines – need more resources”-concerns, because it indicates that the teams have performance ambitions for the right business reasons, and that the organisation has strategic goals that reach beyond the next release, but is leading towards better performance in 1-2 years timeframe.