In our current times, there’s a lot of focus on cutting IT costs. Many leaders are challenged with proving the value of their budgets, their staffing, and even themselves. A lot of people are running scared in the face of this. They are putting pressure on their teams to build more, to add more features, to create more ‘value’ for the company’s dollar.
Consider this approach for a moment in the light of the concept of technical debt. Technical debt is to your IT workforce what credit cards are to your kid in college. Increased features and new products mean more maintenance costs. Increased speed to market means increased bugs. Rising technical debt means that your team will be able to contribute even less in the mid-term and long run. Contributing new, buggy things rather than increasing the value of what you have simply lowers your perceived value to the business.
Before deciding to add new projects, products or features, ask yourself this: is it time instead to pay down existing technical debt? What can I do to lower support costs? How much better can I make what I have? Do I have any open requests from the business to solve old problems? Can I increase my perceived value by simply focusing on lowering overhead and getting rid of ‘old’ problems that have been lingering? Turning your efforts inward to improve now will give you a stronger position in the mid-term and long-term. You will have lower maintenance later when you ramp up new projects, and by clearing your backlog, you’ll be surprised at how much support you will garner from your business partners.
