Except most of the 'stakeholders' don't give a fig for what the Engineers value. Like technical debt, robustness of the solutions, relieving bottlenecks both in code and in development.
So Engineers get herded into little incremental projects that management can swallow as having 'business value'. And the herd marches toward the cliff as the code base wanders around the solution space but never gets fundamentally sound. Anyway, that's my jaded (from experience) view.
No process will solve the lack of understanding. Also, this goes both ways since engineers frequently don't give a fig about business priorities. Sometimes your refactor isn't really that valuable and is costing the company money.
If you have a culture of trust between departments, you should be able to have honest conversations.
That's exactly the call that gets made again and again, by managers. They rarely value code quality; so easy to dismiss with "that's just a refactor". Converse all you want. Business folk are not going to believe that Engineering isn't foolish and just "costing the company money".
That's the culture difference between working in a cost center and working in a profit center. If you just tell business our code is messy and we want to make it nicer, they will tell you to fuck off. Tell them you need to reduce operational risk and maintenance costs. You need to meet each other halfway.
So Engineers get herded into little incremental projects that management can swallow as having 'business value'. And the herd marches toward the cliff as the code base wanders around the solution space but never gets fundamentally sound. Anyway, that's my jaded (from experience) view.