Technical debt is often a byproduct of a simple fact - business moves fast, meaning that the network underpinning business also needs to move fast. This can lead to teams making 'quick' decisions regarding technology to meet immediate project requirements during planning phases. These quick decisions often lead to the adoption of less efficient and sub-optimal technology, but in the short term, who cares as long as project deadlines are hit?
Over time, these short term decisions pile up and lead to technical debt. Technical debt can manifest itself in a variety of ways and, much like financial debt, can cast a long shadow of doubt over the planning and implementation of future projects in the enterprise network.
Despite the long-lasting impact that technical debt can have, that does not mean that every enterprise organization leadership team has a plan, or culture, in place to minimize its cost over time. McKinsey, in a 2022 article, highlighted one company that estimates their technical debt cost to be anywhere between 15%-60% per dollar spend on IT.
How can you ensure that your teams are not waylaid by the rising pile of technical debt and stuck performing reactive tasks that prevent them from striving for true innovation?
Shaping a culture of transparency for technical debt management
There are a lot of reasons that cause technical debt buildup, including:
- Project deadline pressure
- Unclear or shift project scope during development
- Using obsolete technologies that are harder to maintain and integrate with newer technologies
Understanding the multitude of reasons for technical debt growth can be used to foster a more open and collaborative culture between leadership, managers, and operations teams. Essentially, this transparency can be leveraged to gain a consensus on how to approach future projects with technical debt management in mind.
Prior to project kick-off, getting buy-in from engineers and operations teams about how the project will be implemented, the technologies used (with a particular focus on their maintainability, integration capabilities and lifespans), and realistic deadlines can help to solidify expectations and inform decisions made during projects. This should also work vice-versa - engineers are the experts, and their opinions on feasibility should be taken into account.
Things inevitably change during project development, so accruing some technical debt is seen as inevitable. But ensuring your team is bought into a project with an eye on reducing technical debt-inducing decisions reduces the chance that every second or third decision is one which ends up with debt piling up.
Establish quality standards
Establishing quality standards that apply for both leadership and operations teams can go a long way to reducing the potential impact of technical debt. Designing systems with scalability and maintainability as a focus can help to reduce the risk of technical det and prevent engineers having to resort to single-use scripts or more outdated technologies which will later become more difficult to integrate with newer systems.
The job is still not done with designing more scalable and maintainable systems though. With these systems should come best practices on maintaining them. Regularly monitoring the health of the systems in place can help teams predict and avoid these systems becoming outdated and landing on the tech debt pile.
Regularly conduct technical debt audits
All of the above are good steps to reduce technical debt. But this does not mean that technical debt is now a tamed beast. You need to keep on top of it with regular technical debt audits.
To do this, you need to ask some essential questions, including:
- What is the extent of the debt?
- What is causing it?
- Are the relevant people and teams aware of this?
Asking these questions and more will help to understand the scope of debt within the organization and help identify the areas that need immediate attention. After asking these questions, areas that require immediate attention can be identified and categorized based on impact and time required to fix.
Taking these essential steps to embed technical debt management into your company culture can go a long way to minimize its overall impact, establish a consensus and framework of governance, and help network engineers focus on innovating the network. It can also foster a greater sense of transparency and collaboration across the entire organization and reduce cross-team friction. Yet not every organization will do so before they reach their breaking point.
Stay tuned as we dive deeper into technical debt, and how Automated Infrastructure Assurance can help enterprises minimize its overall impact when they do eventually reach their breaking point.
If you'd like to try IP Fabric out for yourself, check out our free, self-guided demo here.
