As I speak to many organizations, I’ve noticed that three factors often hold businesses back: people, process, and technology. Recently, a significant trend has emerged on the technology side—technical debt.
Technical debt, for those that aren’t haunted by it at night, refers to outdated technology and applications that are no longer being supported. This may arise when teams don’t know how to fix or advance the software, or teams aren’t sure how the software operates inside the code. It is preventing the organization from delivering the products and services in a timely manner. The difficulty lies in the interdependencies that the systems have. When project is created to replace systems, they often end up adding more software rather than just replacing the old one entirely.
It’s challenging to grow a business when outdated technology holds it back. How do we overcome technical debt? While it might be impossible to completely eliminate it as technology continues to evolve rapidly, but we can certainly reduce the climbing amount of technical debt.
Reducing Technical Debt
The simple answer to start reducing technical debt is to bring in new technology in parallel. This could be a complete replacement of the existing service. It’s important to consider that new technology may offer opportunities to rethink service delivery and processes, allowing the team to take advantage of its new capabilities.
While some organizations might consider developing custom software from scratch, most will opt for commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS). By evaluating Total Cost of Ownership, the organization can make decision on what is important, including the management and sustainability of the technology. The other thing to consider is how the business models for software have shifted the business models for software have shifted; where older applications might have been purchased outright or required an annual maintenance fee, many modern solutions follow a SaaS model with continuous subscription fees. This shift might require organizations to rethink their software selection.
Options for Addressing Technical Debt
Here are some basic options for organizations with technical debt can consider, tackling one project at a time:
- Replace current software in its entirety, maintaining current features and functionality (and be able to add features).
- Replace with software offers some existing features while adding more new ones.
- Replace application with one that has more bells and whistles than the current software.
- Be open to new ways of getting the outcome.
Each option has their own pros and cons, so it’s crucial to have a plan and back-up plans for decommissioning older technology and consider the ideal and worst case timelines.
Steps to start tackling technical debt:
- Identify the most painful areas and prioritize them. Focus on technology or software that is outdated, dying (or dead), not supported, end of life, costly to maintain, difficult to upgrade or that few people understand how it works.
- Explore readily available software to replace. Embrace the possibilities these applications offer to further improve your current process and technology.
- Rethink what processes and services could look like with the new technology, ideally before purchasing the software. This is a huge opportunity to enhance both customer and employee experiences.
Implementing a Solution
Once you have selected a solution to address your legacy software:
- Start using the Deeper Clarity Method to identify key improvement areas.
- Chunk out the problem into smaller pieces (no need to bite the whole elephant).
- Ensure your team is aligned and understands end users.
- Continuously prototype and test your solutions.
- Iterative is key! As solutions are developed, aim for a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and plan for multiple releases.
Deeper Clarity Method can be a big boost to your organizations by ensuring the team is aligned on what problem is being solved and what solutions would help solve your problems best. We can support your organization in developing new ways to achieve outcomes as you tackle technical debt, prioritize applications for decommissioning, and rethink your processes and services.
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