Reduce and Manage Technical Debt

An effective plan to reduce technical debt requires shareholder consensus on enterprise-wide goals. Before work begins, co-create a charter with key stakeholders to establish clear guidance and avoid misunderstandings later in the process. The charter should include:

• Expectations for ongoing management of infrastructure technical debt versus isolated projects

• What program success looks like, and what value it will provide to the enterprise

• Which groups need to be involved as key stakeholders

• Who will be filling the roles of executive sponsorship, program leadership and infrastructure ownership

• How key program decisions will be made, and how program governance will be performed

• Which measures to use to oversee the program and determine its success

One of the major challenges for reducing technical debt is an inability to agree on key risk areas amongst competing business priorities. 

A consistent approach to assessing technical debt makes it easier to aggregate and present analysis in a useful format. Staff should evaluate based on four fitness factors: business value, financial resources, direct risk and indirect risk. 

Infrastructure fitness assessments offer credible and consistent information about the current health of infrastructure. To provide a basis for all infrastructure life cycle management activities,  I&O leaders should:

• Identify and document entities of interest (e.g., specific components of IT infrastructure hardware and software likely to have high value) in the existing infrastructure

• Apply valuation criteria and data to those entities

• Scrutinize the entities to find technical debt reduction opportunities in the portfolio

There are three primary drivers that need to be accounted for to minimize unnecessary infrastructure technical debt levels:

• Infrastructure asset life cycles: Operating infrastructure components past their end of life or end of support without mitigations poses unacceptable costs and risks for digital business.

• Infrastructure risk life cycles: High-value systems often provide opportunities for compelling cost savings or risk reductions, even if they have not yet reached end of life.

• Strategic portfolio management needs: Mission-critical applications, products, platforms or services often need elevated levels of nonfunctional performance to achieve their potential benefits.

To meet these varied needs, adopt a graded approach for differentiating systems that tailors the depth and frequency of life cycle activities to their business value. This will keep the focus on areas that are most important and reduce efforts in areas that require minimal attention. 

Once the organization has agreed on a technical debt management approach and gathered assessment data about the various infrastructure elements, implement a portfolio management approach to ensure ongoing assessment, life cycle management and governance of the organization’s infrastructure components.

The primary responsibility of the portfolio management approach is to ensure that expenditures in time, people and money are aligned with business outcomes in ways business leaders can understand. In addition, portfolio management can help reserve and supply each practice with the resources required to fully source any investments, programs or projects associated with technical debt reduction.

To begin, focus on governance of infrastructure. Select an infrastructure component to use as a pilot that is high value, has broad support for immediate action and no obvious obstacles. Once the owner drafts an infrastructure life cycle plan (i.e. estimated end of life and remediation plan, fitness assessments), initiate infrastructure governance of those plans. 

After the governing committee approves the draft, begin remediation activities. Ensure the most current, approved plans and relevant information from the review are uploaded to a management repository. Authorize recurring governing committee activities and schedule them to ensure they fulfill their assigned responsibilities outlined in the charter. Once pilot efforts are successful, expand the scope of this work in phases over time to fulfill the goals of the charter.