Last updated on November 21st, 2017 at 08:34 am
This case illustrates how a decision to incur technical debt in one part of an organization can burden other parts of the organization with the metaphorical interest charges on that debt. To gain effective control of technical debt, it’s probably necessary to hold accountable those who make the decisions that lead to incurring new debt.
Background
During the troubles following release of UGI’s StrawIntoGold 1.0 product, the Help Desk operated by UGI’s Customer Service Department was inundated with calls for assistance. Customer Service alerted Engineering, which provided an explanation and an estimated repair date for the customer service representatives to pass on to callers, but in the crush and panic, neither Engineering management nor Customer Service management provided a script for the representatives to use when the calls came in. Consequently, calls took approximately 15% longer to handle than they would have if a carefully worded script had been available. Further, the message conveyed to customers was not always clear or consistent, which resulted in some customers calling again with the same issue.
Discussion
The decision not to provide customer service representatives with a script can be viewed as incurring a technical debt. The extra time handling calls, the extra calls that resulted from the absence of a script, and even a few lost customers, can be viewed as the metaphorical interest charges on that technical debt. Because of the singular nature of this incident, it’s doubtful that a script will ever be written, but if it were, the cost of doing so, and the cost of distributing it and training all customer service representatives would be the metaphorical principal of this technical debt.
The policymaker’s perspective
UGI doesn’t have a means of making those who incurred the debt accountable for the metaphorical interest charges on that debt. In this case, the Customer Service function incurs additional operating expenses because the Engineering and Customer Service, together, elected not to develop a script for the customer service representatives.
Another component of the metaphorical interest charges is the total of lost sales, damage to UGI’s reputation, and possible loss of market share. Marketing could have stepped in to assist with limiting that damage, but because they viewed the problem as technical, they did not participate. A whole-enterprise perspective on managing the technical debt might have led to a collaboration between Engineering, Marketing, and Customer Support to build better relationships with the customers who were affected by the incident.
Accounting properly for the metaphorical interest charges associated with technical debt can lead to a better understanding of the effects of technical debt.
One reason why growth has been so unbelievable at Unbelievable Growth, Inc., is the recent release of their new app for Android and iPhone, StrawIntoGold 1.0, which has an uncanny ability to predict the price movements of specific common stocks over the next 60 seconds. Some users had complained about the unresponsiveness of the user interface in release 1.0, which caused them to miss the 60-second window. Engineering did some quick work and shipped StrawIntoGold 1.1 to fix the problem. In their haste, they were unable to automate all testing, and 17 interns that were hired just for that release performed some critical tests manually to ensure that the problem had been fixed. Because those manual tests have not yet been automated, and because the interns have been let go, the engineers working on StrawIntoGold 2.0 are doing their own tests manually, which is reducing their productivity considerably. Release 2.0 is now three months late, so far, and the projected ship date is at least three months from now.
