Tag: operations

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Technical debt retirement: where is the technical debt?

When we first set out to plan a large technical debt retirement project (DRP), a question that arises very early in the planning process is this: Which assets are carrying the kind of technical debt we want to retire? And a second question is: Which operations will be affected—and when—by the debt retirement work? Although these questions are clear, and easily expressed, the answers might not be. And the answers are important. So where is the technical debt?

Part of the cutting head of an 84-inch (2.13 m) tunnel boring machine
Part of the cutting head of an 84-inch (2.13 m) tunnel boring machine used for installing a sewer in Chicago, Illinois, USA, in 2014. Photo © 2014 by J. Crocker.

Determining which of the enterprise’s many technological assets might be carrying the Technical Debt In Question (TDIQ) can be a complex exercise in itself, because inspecting the asset might be necessary. Inspection might require temporarily suspending operations, or determining windows of time during which inspection can be performed safely and without interfering with operations. Further, inspection might require knowledge of the asset that the DRP team doesn’t possess. Moreover, access to the asset might be restricted in some way. In these cases, staff from the unit responsible for the asset must be available to assist with the inspection.

Although asset inspection might be necessary or preferable, it might not be sufficient for determining which assets are carrying the TDIQ. This is easy to understand for physical assets, like, say, determining the release version of the firmware of the hydraulic controller electronics of a tunnel boring machine. But asset inspection might also be insufficient for purely software assets. For determining the presence of the TDIQ in software assets, reading source code might not be sufficient or efficient. It might be easier, faster, and more accurate to operate the asset under special conditions. For example, an inspector might want to provide specific inputs to the asset and then examine its responses. As a second example, we might use automation assistance to examine the internal structure of the asset, searching for instances of the TDIQ. And as with other assets, the assistance of the staff of the unit responsible for the asset might be necessary for the inspection.

Which enterprise operations depend on debt-bearing assets?

Knowing which assets bear the TDIQ is useful to the DRP team as it plans the work to retire the TDIQ. But part of that plan could include service disruptions. If so, it’s also necessary to determine how those disruptions might affect operations, to enable the team to control the effects of the disruptions, and negotiate with affected parties. Thus for each asset that bears the TDIQ, we need to determine what operations would be affected if the asset is removed from service temporarily.

Observing actual operations in conditions in which the asset is out of service in whole or in part might be the only economical way to discover which enterprise functions depend on the assets that carry the TDIQ. Other techniques include examining historical data such as trouble reports and outstanding defect lists, and correlating them across multiple asset histories and operations histories.

In some cases, these investigations produce results that have a limited validity lifetime, owing to ongoing evolution of the debt-bearing assets and the assets that interact with them. For that reason, the actual work of retiring the TDIQ must begin as soon as possible after the inventory is complete, and possibly even before that. This suggests that the size of the DRP team is a critical success factor, because size enables the team to complete the inventory inspections rapidly, before the end of the validity lifetime of the team’s research results.

Managing teams of great size is a notoriously difficult problem. For this reason, delegating some of the DRP research effort directly to the business units that own the assets in question can provide the labor hours and expertise needed for the research. In this way, the DRP can deploy a team-of-teams structure, known as a Multi-Team System (MTS) [Mathieu 2001] [Marks 2005]. The DRP team can then bring to bear a large force in a way that renders the overall MTS manageable.

References

[Marks 2005] Michelle A. Marks, Leslie A. DeChurch, John E. Mathieu, Frederick J. Panzer, and Alexander Alonso. “Teamwork in multiteam systems,” Journal of Applied Psychology 90:5, 964-971, 2005.

Cited in:

[Mathieu 2001] John E. Mathieu, Michelle A. Marks and Stephen J. Zaccaro. “Multi-team systems”, in Neil Anderson, Deniz S. Ones, Handan Kepir Sinangil, and Chockalingam Viswesvaran, eds., Handbook of Industrial, Work, and Organizational Psychology Volume 2: Organizational Psychology, London: Sage Publications, 2001, 289–313.

Cited in:

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Cultural debt can be the primary driver of technical debt

Last updated on June 2nd, 2018 at 10:35 pm

Cultural debt can be expensive because, like technical debt, it can incur ongoing metaphorical interest charges. Schein defines organizational culture as “…a pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration…” [Schein 2016]. Following the concept of technical debt, we can regard as cultural debt the subset of shared basic assumptions comprising enterprise culture that are no longer fitting for enterprise realities. We can also include as cultural debt any assumptions that ought to be shared, but which are missing or are only partially shared. And we can include shared assumptions that conflict with each other and need to be resolved.

An example of cultural debt: the term “IT”

A tape measure calibrated in both feet/inches and meters/centimeters
A tape measure calibrated in both feet/inches and meters/centimeters. The need to possess tools that serve both measurement systems can be viewed as the metaphorical interest charges on a technical debt resulting from the failure to retire the older “English” system. But from another perspective, the debt involved is actually cultural. Retiring the older system would truly involve a cultural shift.

For most modern enterprises, one element of cultural debt is the very term IT itself — information technology. Coined in 1958 by Leavitt and Whisler [Leavitt 1958], the term was apt up to as recently as 20 years ago, when the role of IT was primarily management, storage, retrieval, manipulation, and presentation of data — information — by technological means. Although those functions remain relevant, the responsibilities of IT have expanded dramatically since 1958. In many organizations, IT is now responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining the communication infrastructure, including Internet access, personal computers, networking, Web presence, telephones, video conferencing equipment, and television.

In modern organizations in which communication plays a critical and strategic role, an essential element for success is a clear understanding of what IT does and what it contributes. To regard IT as the “information technology” function of the enterprise is, therefore, to risk overlooking and undervaluing these more recently acquired responsibilities. And since the IT function is no longer solely responsible for enterprise information, using the name “IT” or the term information technology risks overvaluing the role of the IT organization relative to information management, while undervaluing its role relative to communications.

In Schein’s culture framework, the term IT reflects a shared assumption about the focus and span of the IT function. That assumption is that IT is responsible for information—an assumption that is no longer well aligned to the reality of the role of IT. We can regard this misalignment as a cultural debt.

The consequences of this particular kind of cultural debt can be severe. For instance, IT is typically responsible for selecting and configuring software for personal computers (PCs) — both desktop and laptop. This responsibility can arise as a consequence of two shared assumptions. First, that computers process information, and second, that IT is responsible for technology-based information processing. The result is that decisions about what many regard as a “personal” computer are not in the control of the person who uses the computer. This conflict in shared assumptions can lead to conflict between PC users and IT, when the IT decision is at variance with their personal preferences.

Worse, a centralized decision process for determining PC configurations is likely to produce outcomes less suitable than would a process more focused at the individual level, which only adds to the frustrations of PC users, and exacerbates the conflict between them and IT. To mitigate the risk that some PC users might try to circumvent IT policy, IT must deploy technology to ensure adherence to their policies. We can regard all of that activity, on the part of both IT and the PC users, as metaphorical interest charges on cultural debt.

An example of retiring cultural debt

In 1987, Edward Yourdon founded a magazine then known as American Programmer. In 1990, Cutter Information Corporation purchased the rights to American Programmer and created Cutter IT Journal, which name includes the term IT. At the time IT was more suitable than the term programmer. As noted above, the term IT, while once useful and apt, is now outmoded at best and often misleading. Just as the functional name IT in organizations constitutes cultural debt, so it does in the name of a journal.

So in the autumn of 2016, Cutter IT Journal retired the cultural debt in its name, and became Cutter Business Technology Journal. Journals rarely change their names. When they do, the impact of the journal is temporarily depressed because of the split of citations between the former title and the new title for two years or so [Tempest 2005]. But as research fields change, their journals must keep pace. Evidently Cutter felt a significant need to retire its cultural debt — significant enough to justify a temporary effect on impact.

What about cultural debt retirement in companies?

Difficulties associated with retiring cultural debt in companies depend strongly on both the nature of the culture and the nature of the debt. To provide insight into the issues that can arise, let’s continue with our exploration of the term IT and its cultural implications.

In many organizations, IT reports to an enterprise Chief Information Officer (CIO). Associated with this official’s title are some of the same cultural debts we find associated with the name of the IT organization. First, within their organizations, CIOs aren’t the only officers with information management responsibility. Second, many CIOs have responsibilities that extend beyond information management, to include, for example, the communication infrastructure. And unlike other peer titles such as CEO, CFO, CMO, and COO, the CIO title evokes separation from business-oriented decisions. That separation contributes to a cultural wall between “IT” and “the business.”

When cultures view IT as an information-centric service organization, a remnant perhaps of the middle or late 20th century, they tend to regard IT as a source of expense to be minimized, rather than as a strategic partner [Ross 2000]. Trends toward strategic acceptance of IT are nevertheless favorable, with room for improvement, according to recent surveys of CIOs [CIO 2018], probably because of reality.

The reality is that business technology must contribute to formulation and implementation of enterprise strategy. To the extent that CIOs and their organizations are viewed as separate from “the business,” their ability to help shape enterprise strategy is limited. This situation subjects CIOs to cultural assumptions about their responsibilities that in some instances conflict with each other, or with enterprise reality. That’s a significant source of the metaphorical interest charges on the cultural debt.

One possible way to retire this debt might entail retitling Chief Information Officer to Chief Business Technology Officer (CBTO). That’s precisely what happened at Forrester Research in 2011 [Plant 2014].

Unfortunately, the name CBTO conflicts with the three-word pattern of enterprise officer titles (C*O), which might create an urge to name the office Chief Technology Officer (CTO). But that role usually has responsibility for the functions that create technological products or services. Thus, for many organizations, to create a CBTO where there is already a CTO might create further sources of conflict. Using the CTO designation for the CBTO is probably impractical.

But we must find some way to retire this particular cultural debt, because it is such an effective generator of technical debt. CBTO seems to be the best available path.

References

[CIO 2018] CIO. “2018 State of the Cio: CIOs Race Towards Digital Business,” CIO, winter 2018.

Available: here; Retrieved March 30, 2018

Cited in:

[Leavitt 1958] Harold J. Leavitt and Thomas L. Whisler. “Management in the 1980s,” Harvard Business Review, November-December, 36, 41-48, 1958.

Cited in:

[Marks 2005] Michelle A. Marks, Leslie A. DeChurch, John E. Mathieu, Frederick J. Panzer, and Alexander Alonso. “Teamwork in multiteam systems,” Journal of Applied Psychology 90:5, 964-971, 2005.

Cited in:

[Mathieu 2001] John E. Mathieu, Michelle A. Marks and Stephen J. Zaccaro. “Multi-team systems”, in Neil Anderson, Deniz S. Ones, Handan Kepir Sinangil, and Chockalingam Viswesvaran, eds., Handbook of Industrial, Work, and Organizational Psychology Volume 2: Organizational Psychology, London: Sage Publications, 2001, 289–313.

Cited in:

[Plant 2014] Robert Plant. “IT Has Finally Cracked the C-Suite,” Harvard Business Review, July 16, 2014.

Available: here; Retrieved: April 8, 2018

Cited in:

[Ross 2000] Jeanne W. Ross and David F. Feeny. “The Evolving Role of the CIO,” in Framing the Domains of IS Management Research: Glimpsing the Future through the Past, edited by Robert W. Zmud. Pinnaflex, 2000.

Available: here; Retrieved: December 20, 2017.

Cited in:

[Schein 2016] Edgar H. Schein. Organizational Culture and Leadership, Fifth Edition, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2016.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[Tempest 2005] “The effect of journal title changes on impact factors,” Learned Publishing 18, 57–62, 2005.

Available: here; Retrieved: April 5, 2018

Cited in:

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Self-sustaining technical knowledge deficits during contract negotiations

Last updated on February 1st, 2018 at 07:30 am

Enterprises that grow by acquisition find themselves acquiring the technological assets of the organizations they acquire. And most enterprises acquire technological assets by other means as well. In either case, the contract negotiation teams need technical knowledge to evaluate and project the effects of these acquisitions on total enterprise technical debt. But as total enterprise technical debt grows, the capacity of enterprise technologists to support new contract negotiations declines, which leads to a self-sustaining cycle of technical knowledge deficits. Policymakers and strategic planners are likely the most effective possible advocates for breaking the cycle by hiring more technologists.

Avoid technical knowledge deficits in important contract negotiations
Contract negotiations can be complex

Negotiating contracts with vendors that provide outsourcing services or subcontracting work, or with organizations to be acquired, requires a sophisticated appreciation of the technical debt status of the assets acquired or to be acquired. The technical debt in question includes more than just the debt borne by the asset as it stands in its pre-acquisition context. It also includes the debt that the asset will carry after it’s inserted into the asset portfolio of the acquiring enterprise.

These two debts — pre-acquisition and post-acquisition — can differ, because the interfaces, standards, and approaches of the acquiring organization likely differ from those prevailing within the vendor organization or the acquired organization. Knowledge of the interfaces, standards, and approaches of both parties to the transaction is therefore required to make a valid assessment of the total post-acquisition levels of technical debt.

The enterprise negotiation team therefore requires the services of technologists who are familiar with the maintenance, extension, and cybersecurity work that will be performed on the acquired assets post-acquisition. When the technical debt situation in the enterprise reaches a level so serious that it requires the full attention of all available technologists, they cannot be spared for negotiating contracts. If this happens, then contract negotiation teams could experience a deficit of knowledge concerning the consequences of acquiring assets laden with technical debt. That leads to increasing levels of non-strategic technical debt, which then has the potential to exacerbate the technical knowledge deficit for the negotiating teams.

This situation is an example of what’s commonly called a vicious cycle. After technical debt has reached a critical level, there are really only two tactics that can break the cycle — get more engineers, or suspend some work.

References

[CIO 2018] CIO. “2018 State of the Cio: CIOs Race Towards Digital Business,” CIO, winter 2018.

Available: here; Retrieved March 30, 2018

Cited in:

[Leavitt 1958] Harold J. Leavitt and Thomas L. Whisler. “Management in the 1980s,” Harvard Business Review, November-December, 36, 41-48, 1958.

Cited in:

[Marks 2005] Michelle A. Marks, Leslie A. DeChurch, John E. Mathieu, Frederick J. Panzer, and Alexander Alonso. “Teamwork in multiteam systems,” Journal of Applied Psychology 90:5, 964-971, 2005.

Cited in:

[Mathieu 2001] John E. Mathieu, Michelle A. Marks and Stephen J. Zaccaro. “Multi-team systems”, in Neil Anderson, Deniz S. Ones, Handan Kepir Sinangil, and Chockalingam Viswesvaran, eds., Handbook of Industrial, Work, and Organizational Psychology Volume 2: Organizational Psychology, London: Sage Publications, 2001, 289–313.

Cited in:

[Plant 2014] Robert Plant. “IT Has Finally Cracked the C-Suite,” Harvard Business Review, July 16, 2014.

Available: here; Retrieved: April 8, 2018

Cited in:

[Ross 2000] Jeanne W. Ross and David F. Feeny. “The Evolving Role of the CIO,” in Framing the Domains of IS Management Research: Glimpsing the Future through the Past, edited by Robert W. Zmud. Pinnaflex, 2000.

Available: here; Retrieved: December 20, 2017.

Cited in:

[Schein 2016] Edgar H. Schein. Organizational Culture and Leadership, Fifth Edition, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2016.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[Tempest 2005] “The effect of journal title changes on impact factors,” Learned Publishing 18, 57–62, 2005.

Available: here; Retrieved: April 5, 2018

Cited in:

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Organizational culture and technical debt

Last updated on June 29th, 2018 at 08:20 pm

Organizational culture affects—and is affected by—everything the organization does. It is complex beyond imagining. It both creates leaders and is shaped by them [Schein 2016]. Fortunately, for our narrow purposes—namely, improving how we manage technical debt—we need to explore neither every available model of culture nor their dynamics. All we need to know is how to adjust cultures so that they’re more amenable to technical debt management efforts. Even so, that’s an ambitious objective.

A bonsai tree
A bonsai tree. We cannot control the growth of bonsai in detail. We can only make suggestions, and hope that the tree will follow our guidance. So it is with organizational culture.

Organizational culture is the collection of values, beliefs, and principles shared among the people of the organization. Some of these elements are within the awareness of the organization’s people, but some might not be. Culture excludes behavior; behavior is a result of the combined effects of personal choices and organizational culture.

Our objective is ambitious because it is at once specific and general. It is general in the sense that as a goal, we would like to devise prescriptions for all organizational cultures as they strive to be more effective in managing technical debt. It is specific in the sense that we’re concerned only with those cultural factors that affect technical debt management.

But aren’t there enough technical problems to keep us occupied before we get involved in all that culture change stuff? The answer to that, I believe, is yes, but we can make more rapid progress if we allow our technical investigations to be guided by considerations of culture.

Some of our best minds have been working on the technical debt problem for more than two decades, mostly from the technological perspective. True, we haven’t given the issue the attention and resources it deserves. That might be changing now, but one can reasonably ask a simple question: If some of the causes of the technical debt problem are cultural, and if we begin to make some technological progress in reducing the burden of technical debt, wouldn’t the cultural causes begin to dominate at some point? If that were to happen, the effectiveness of our technical solutions would appear to decline, even though they might be “right,” because technical solutions cannot address cultural problems.

It seems only prudent to prepare for that case by examining the role of culture in creating technical debt and preventing its retirement.

A reasonable goal might be to define a set of attributes an organizational culture should have if the organization wants to limit the contributions of culture to the formation and persistence of technical debt. I suspect that for most cultures, change would be required, because most organizations now carry more technical debt than they would care to acknowledge.

As with all culture change efforts, we seek, in the end, to modify the behavior of the people who live within that culture. We want to modify aspects of the culture so as to lead its people to be more likely to make choices that are consistent with prudent technical debt management.

With that goal in mind, I’m opening a thread in this blog that I hope will stimulate your thinking and mine about how organizational culture and technical debt interact. This post will contain an outline of these ruminations. Here’s what I have so far:

References

[CIO 2018] CIO. “2018 State of the Cio: CIOs Race Towards Digital Business,” CIO, winter 2018.

Available: here; Retrieved March 30, 2018

Cited in:

[Leavitt 1958] Harold J. Leavitt and Thomas L. Whisler. “Management in the 1980s,” Harvard Business Review, November-December, 36, 41-48, 1958.

Cited in:

[Marks 2005] Michelle A. Marks, Leslie A. DeChurch, John E. Mathieu, Frederick J. Panzer, and Alexander Alonso. “Teamwork in multiteam systems,” Journal of Applied Psychology 90:5, 964-971, 2005.

Cited in:

[Mathieu 2001] John E. Mathieu, Michelle A. Marks and Stephen J. Zaccaro. “Multi-team systems”, in Neil Anderson, Deniz S. Ones, Handan Kepir Sinangil, and Chockalingam Viswesvaran, eds., Handbook of Industrial, Work, and Organizational Psychology Volume 2: Organizational Psychology, London: Sage Publications, 2001, 289–313.

Cited in:

[Plant 2014] Robert Plant. “IT Has Finally Cracked the C-Suite,” Harvard Business Review, July 16, 2014.

Available: here; Retrieved: April 8, 2018

Cited in:

[Ross 2000] Jeanne W. Ross and David F. Feeny. “The Evolving Role of the CIO,” in Framing the Domains of IS Management Research: Glimpsing the Future through the Past, edited by Robert W. Zmud. Pinnaflex, 2000.

Available: here; Retrieved: December 20, 2017.

Cited in:

[Schein 2016] Edgar H. Schein. Organizational Culture and Leadership, Fifth Edition, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2016.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[Tempest 2005] “The effect of journal title changes on impact factors,” Learned Publishing 18, 57–62, 2005.

Available: here; Retrieved: April 5, 2018

Cited in:

Related posts

  • Technical debt use disorder
    Technical debt use disorder is a pattern in which the organization can’t seem to retire much of its technical debt, or can’t stop incurring increasing burdens of technical debt, even though everyone in the organization realizes—or almost everyone realizes—that technical debt is harming the organization.
  • Technical debt smell
    Technical debt smell would be a useful indicator of severe technical debt problems. It doesn’t have a real smell, but it might have a metaphorical smell.
  • Using SMART goals for technical debt reduction
    Reducing the enterprise burden of technical debt by setting “SMART goals” in a naïve way might not work. Measuring technical debt is notoriously difficult, and in any case the interest charges matter more than debt volume. Effective SMART goals for technical debt reduction must be closely related to behavior.
  • Cultural debt can be the primary driver of technical debt
    Cultural debt can be expensive, because, like technical debt, it can incur ongoing metaphorical interest charges. Cultural debt is the unfulfilled obligation to alter organizational culture so as to better align it with organizational imperatives.
  • Technical debt: monochronic and polychronic cultures
    Conventional project management might not be applicable to technical debt retirement efforts. Regarding them as “projects,” with defined schedules, defined budgets, and defined staff assignments might be a serious error, culturally speaking. Agile approaches, which are inherently more P-style in nature, might be required.
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Technical debt in the highway system

Last updated on December 11th, 2018 at 11:26 am

The ghost ramps of highway I-695 in Somerville, Massachusetts
The ghost ramps of highway I-695 in Somerville, Massachusetts. Photo (cc) Nick Allen.

Interstate 695 was planned in 1955 as an “inner belt” circumferential route in Boston and adjacent towns. When it was cancelled in 1971, construction had already begun. Rights of way that had been cleared have since been reused for roads and mass transit, but some never-used structures remain to this day, including a “ghost ramp” in Somerville that would have connected I-695 to I-93. This ramp, which is a mere stub that begins on an elevated stretch of I-93 and ends in mid-air, and which is blocked off to prevent use, constitutes technical debt in the form of incomplete implementation. Google satellite view

For safety reasons, the ghost ramp must be regularly inspected, maintained, and insured, but it provides no utility and it is not used for any civic purpose. Because the cost of retiring this technical debt—namely, demolition costs—would likely exceed the present value of the lifetime costs of inspection, maintenance, and insurance, the ghost ramp remains.

Sometimes, the best way to deal with technical debt is to leave it in place.

References

[CIO 2018] CIO. “2018 State of the Cio: CIOs Race Towards Digital Business,” CIO, winter 2018.

Available: here; Retrieved March 30, 2018

Cited in:

[Leavitt 1958] Harold J. Leavitt and Thomas L. Whisler. “Management in the 1980s,” Harvard Business Review, November-December, 36, 41-48, 1958.

Cited in:

[Marks 2005] Michelle A. Marks, Leslie A. DeChurch, John E. Mathieu, Frederick J. Panzer, and Alexander Alonso. “Teamwork in multiteam systems,” Journal of Applied Psychology 90:5, 964-971, 2005.

Cited in:

[Mathieu 2001] John E. Mathieu, Michelle A. Marks and Stephen J. Zaccaro. “Multi-team systems”, in Neil Anderson, Deniz S. Ones, Handan Kepir Sinangil, and Chockalingam Viswesvaran, eds., Handbook of Industrial, Work, and Organizational Psychology Volume 2: Organizational Psychology, London: Sage Publications, 2001, 289–313.

Cited in:

[Plant 2014] Robert Plant. “IT Has Finally Cracked the C-Suite,” Harvard Business Review, July 16, 2014.

Available: here; Retrieved: April 8, 2018

Cited in:

[Ross 2000] Jeanne W. Ross and David F. Feeny. “The Evolving Role of the CIO,” in Framing the Domains of IS Management Research: Glimpsing the Future through the Past, edited by Robert W. Zmud. Pinnaflex, 2000.

Available: here; Retrieved: December 20, 2017.

Cited in:

[Schein 2016] Edgar H. Schein. Organizational Culture and Leadership, Fifth Edition, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2016.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[Tempest 2005] “The effect of journal title changes on impact factors,” Learned Publishing 18, 57–62, 2005.

Available: here; Retrieved: April 5, 2018

Cited in:

Related posts

  • Case 3: Help desk operations
    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.
  • Case 2: New software Development
    This case illustrates the importance of recognizing as technical debt any artifact whose condition or absence contributes to a loss of organizational effectiveness or agility. It describes a situation related to software development, and which some would argue is not actually technical debt.
  • Case 1: A platform upgrade
    This case involves deferring a platform upgrade for SharePoint sites. It illustrates the importance of the policymaker's view of technical debt, as compared to the view that restricts technical debt to the engineering or IT functions.
  • Technical debt in a rail system
    Here’s an example of using the technical debt metaphor to think about how elements of a hardware asset can limit the ability of the enterprise to attain and maintain market leadership. The asset in this example is the trackbed of Amtrak’s Acela Express.
Posted on

Case 3: Help desk operations

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

A tech support person at workDuring 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.

References

[CIO 2018] CIO. “2018 State of the Cio: CIOs Race Towards Digital Business,” CIO, winter 2018.

Available: here; Retrieved March 30, 2018

Cited in:

[Leavitt 1958] Harold J. Leavitt and Thomas L. Whisler. “Management in the 1980s,” Harvard Business Review, November-December, 36, 41-48, 1958.

Cited in:

[Marks 2005] Michelle A. Marks, Leslie A. DeChurch, John E. Mathieu, Frederick J. Panzer, and Alexander Alonso. “Teamwork in multiteam systems,” Journal of Applied Psychology 90:5, 964-971, 2005.

Cited in:

[Mathieu 2001] John E. Mathieu, Michelle A. Marks and Stephen J. Zaccaro. “Multi-team systems”, in Neil Anderson, Deniz S. Ones, Handan Kepir Sinangil, and Chockalingam Viswesvaran, eds., Handbook of Industrial, Work, and Organizational Psychology Volume 2: Organizational Psychology, London: Sage Publications, 2001, 289–313.

Cited in:

[Plant 2014] Robert Plant. “IT Has Finally Cracked the C-Suite,” Harvard Business Review, July 16, 2014.

Available: here; Retrieved: April 8, 2018

Cited in:

[Ross 2000] Jeanne W. Ross and David F. Feeny. “The Evolving Role of the CIO,” in Framing the Domains of IS Management Research: Glimpsing the Future through the Past, edited by Robert W. Zmud. Pinnaflex, 2000.

Available: here; Retrieved: December 20, 2017.

Cited in:

[Schein 2016] Edgar H. Schein. Organizational Culture and Leadership, Fifth Edition, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2016.

Order from Amazon

Cited in:

[Tempest 2005] “The effect of journal title changes on impact factors,” Learned Publishing 18, 57–62, 2005.

Available: here; Retrieved: April 5, 2018

Cited in:

Related posts

  • Case 2: New software Development
    This case illustrates the importance of recognizing as technical debt any artifact whose condition or absence contributes to a loss of organizational effectiveness or agility. It describes a situation related to software development, and which some would argue is not actually technical debt.
  • Case 1: A platform upgrade
    This case involves deferring a platform upgrade for SharePoint sites. It illustrates the importance of the policymaker's view of technical debt, as compared to the view that restricts technical debt to the engineering or IT functions.
  • Technical debt in the highway system
    Here’s an example of using the technical debt metaphor in civil engineering. In this case, it helps us understand why, in some cases, leaving some technical debt in place can be a better choice than retiring it.
  • Technical debt in a rail system
    Here’s an example of using the technical debt metaphor to think about how elements of a hardware asset can limit the ability of the enterprise to attain and maintain market leadership. The asset in this example is the trackbed of Amtrak’s Acela Express.
Posted on

Case 1: A platform upgrade

Last updated on November 21st, 2017 at 08:35 am

This case involves deferring a platform upgrade for SharePoint sites. It illustrates the importance of the policymaker’s view of technical debt, as compared to the view that restricts technical debt to the engineering or IT functions.

Background
File servers in a rack
File servers in a rack. Photo (cc) Abigor courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Growth at the fictional company Unbelievable Growth, Inc. (UGI) has been so unbelievable that there is now a shortage of financial resources for migrating the last groups of SharePoint users from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013. Consequently, the CFO instructed IT to continue to support SharePoint 2010 for at least two more quarters. Meanwhile, the affected SharePoint users must continue to use SharePoint 2010. Someday, currently set for two quarters from now, IT and the users of SharePoint 2010 will be required to migrate to SharePoint 2013. Both IT and the users might need to expend resources to keep the SharePoint 2010 site operational. Users who make enhancements to their SharePoint 2010 sites will need to migrate that work to the SharePoint 2013 site, and that might require some rework that would have been unnecessary if the migration had not been deferred.

Discussion

We can regard as a debt UGI’s decision to defer the SharePoint migration. Because it isn’t a financial obligation, we call it a technical debt. UGI must retire that technical debt two quarters from now, when they finally execute the migration from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013. We can regard the cost of the final migration as the (metaphorical) principal of the technical debt. In the meantime, IT and the users must do some work that might have been unnecessary if they could have performed the migration now. We can regard that extra work as the (metaphorical) interest charges on that technical debt.

The policymaker’s perspective

Some — indeed most — conventional views of technical debt do not regard the deferred upgrade as technical debt, for various reasons: it isn’t software, or it isn’t in a product, or it isn’t a shortcut taken for expedience, and so on. Moreover, the person who made the decision to take on the debt was the CFO, who is not an engineer, and who might not even realize that the implications of the decision result in taking on technical debt.

But from the viewpoint of the policy maker, the commitment to execute the upgrade in the future is equivalent to accepting a technical obligation. For the enterprise, it is a technical debt. Following UGI’s current account procedures, the metaphorical interest on that technical debt will be paid by the SharePoint users and by IT, and it will appear as an operating expense for those groups. That’s unfortunate, because the purpose of deferring the upgrade was unrelated to their operations. It was an enterprise cost-leveling maneuver whose costs should probably be accounted for at the enterprise level to ensure that operational costs for the SharePoint users and for IT are accurately represented, and to accurately represent the CFO’s operations.

Non-technical decisions, occurring anywhere in the enterprise, can sometimes lead to incurring technical debt. Enterprise policy intended to support effective technical debt management must take these phenomena into account.

References

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[Leavitt 1958] Harold J. Leavitt and Thomas L. Whisler. “Management in the 1980s,” Harvard Business Review, November-December, 36, 41-48, 1958.

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[Marks 2005] Michelle A. Marks, Leslie A. DeChurch, John E. Mathieu, Frederick J. Panzer, and Alexander Alonso. “Teamwork in multiteam systems,” Journal of Applied Psychology 90:5, 964-971, 2005.

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[Mathieu 2001] John E. Mathieu, Michelle A. Marks and Stephen J. Zaccaro. “Multi-team systems”, in Neil Anderson, Deniz S. Ones, Handan Kepir Sinangil, and Chockalingam Viswesvaran, eds., Handbook of Industrial, Work, and Organizational Psychology Volume 2: Organizational Psychology, London: Sage Publications, 2001, 289–313.

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[Plant 2014] Robert Plant. “IT Has Finally Cracked the C-Suite,” Harvard Business Review, July 16, 2014.

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[Ross 2000] Jeanne W. Ross and David F. Feeny. “The Evolving Role of the CIO,” in Framing the Domains of IS Management Research: Glimpsing the Future through the Past, edited by Robert W. Zmud. Pinnaflex, 2000.

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[Schein 2016] Edgar H. Schein. Organizational Culture and Leadership, Fifth Edition, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2016.

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[Tempest 2005] “The effect of journal title changes on impact factors,” Learned Publishing 18, 57–62, 2005.

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