Manage Your Technical Debt

Make the case to manage technical debt in terms of business impact.

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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.

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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.
1.2 Discuss your organization’s technical debt risk.
  • Goals, opportunities, and constraints related to tech debt management
1.3 Identify 5-10 high-impact technical debts to structure the impact analysis.
  • A list of technical debt

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.
  • Business impact scoring scales
2.2 Identify reasonable scenarios to structure the impact analysis.
  • Scenarios to support the impact analysis
2.3 Apply the scoring scale to identify the business impact of each technical debt.
  • Preliminary technical debt impact scores

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.
3.2 Roll up the results of the impact analysis and identify critical (highest impact) technical debts.
3.3 Brainstorm projects and action items to manage and pay back critical technical debt.
3.4 Prioritize projects and action items to build a roadmap.
  • Technical debt business impact analysis
  • Technical debt management roadmap

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.
4.2 Identify three possible courses of action to pay back each critical technical debt.
4.3 Identify immediate next steps to manage remaining tech debt and limit the introduction of new tech debt.
  • Options for technical debt payback
  • Technical debt executive summary
  • Immediate next steps to manage technical debt
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