Manage Your Technical Debt
Make the case to manage technical debt in terms of business impact.
RETIRED CONTENT
Please note that the content on this page is retired. This content is not maintained and may contain information or links that are out of date.Technical debt is everywhere, and you won’t get rid of it all. But it must be managed, or it will get in the way of delivering new features and can significantly impact your business.
- IT doesn’t have the resources or authority to make needed changes to address the impact of tech debt and can’t make the case for improvement without good data on the problem.
- Efforts to track technical debt get stuck in the weeds, don’t connect technical issues to business impact, and run out of steam.
Help your business leadership make better risk management decisions.
- Define and identify your technical debt, focusing on tech debt you think you can actually fix.
- Conduct a streamlined and targeted business impact analysis to prioritize tech debt based on its ongoing business impact.
- Identify options to better manage technical debt and present those options to business decision makers, as needed.
Book Your Workshop
Onsite Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn’t enough, we offer low-cost onsite delivery of our Project Workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a road map in place to complete your project successfully.
Module 1: Define technical debt
The Purpose
Create a working definition of technical debt and identify the technical debt in your environment.
Key Benefits Achieved
List your technical debt.
| Activities: | Outputs: | |
|---|---|---|
| 1.1 | Develop a working definition for technical debt. |
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| 1.2 | Discuss your organization’s technical debt risk. |
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| 1.3 | Identify 5-10 high-impact technical debts to structure the impact analysis. |
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Module 2: Measure technical debt
The Purpose
Conduct a more objective assessment of the business impact of technical debt.
Key Benefits Achieved
Identify the most critical technical debt in your environment, in terms of business risk.
| Activities: | Outputs: | |
|---|---|---|
| 2.1 | Review and modify business impact scoring scales. |
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| 2.2 | Identify reasonable scenarios to structure the impact analysis. |
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| 2.3 | Apply the scoring scale to identify the business impact of each technical debt. |
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Module 3: Build a roadmap
The Purpose
Analyze the impact of your technical debt to devise a roadmap that addresses it.
Key Benefits Achieved
Create your plan to manage technical debt.
| Activities: | Outputs: | |
|---|---|---|
| 3.1 | Finish the impact analysis. |
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| 3.2 | Roll up the results of the impact analysis and identify critical (highest impact) technical debts. |
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| 3.3 | Brainstorm projects and action items to manage and pay back critical technical debt. |
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| 3.4 | Prioritize projects and action items to build a roadmap. |
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Module 4: Manage technical debt
The Purpose
Leverage the technical debt impact analysis to identify, compare, and quantify projects that fix technical debt and projects that prevent it.
Key Benefits Achieved
Plan and next steps to effectively manage technical debt.
| Activities: | Outputs: | |
|---|---|---|
| 4.1 | Use the items on the roadmap to identify different courses of action to address critical technical debt. |
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| 4.2 | Identify three possible courses of action to pay back each critical technical debt. |
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| 4.3 | Identify immediate next steps to manage remaining tech debt and limit the introduction of new tech debt. |
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