A coworker introduced me to the concept of a 'novelty budget', and I find it really useful. If my team is taking on a new project, there are many ways to improve on how things have been done in the past. But doing anything new carries some risk. If every part of the project is new, it will be very risky.

So I use the idea of a novelty budget to negotiate with my engineers. "What things do you really want to change? Let's focus on that, and use tried and true, albeit suboptimal, methods for the other stuff, to stay within our novelty budget." Down the road, once you can handle more risk, you can introduce one of those changes that were originally punted.