[Music] welcome back to the Enterprise agility podcast I'm your host John Lim we're joined Again by Fred Champlain and Andy Jordan today we'll talk through how technical debt is managed how it's assessed and how to prioritize specifically from a technology standpoint for I imagine that if you've got an application that is problematic that is uh potentially creating some risk it's damaging the the optimal flow of value there's a number of things that organizations could do to that from you know a little bit of above fixing to complete replacement but how would an organization go about prioritizing the way that it addresses technical debt and what might some of those Solutions be that uh that it would consider Andy that's a a great topic um it's a challenge of of every organization every Enterprise on exactly what do you do with your technical de how do you discover it how do you find it and there's uh several practices including application portfolio management that allows us to uh observe uh the applications and in our technology in action so we can gather Telemetry we can understand the performance um sometimes technical debt manifest as a bottleneck uh it might be a performance issue it it may be uh that there's dependencies uh to other uh uh applications that need to be retired for example so the coordination across our our technology landscape orate is really critical so by having a sense of uh the a systems view of our applications uh finding those dependencies understanding where they're at integration points uh or classic um you know there's all a number of of technical debt factors to think about in terms of uh where we have interface potentially those interfaces are are uh external so we have another factor of those external Dynamics are changing as well that we need to think about in terms of what what's causing that technical dat one thing to think about technical data to be aware of it's It's Dynamic it changes over time so something that is working today may be impacted indirectly uh that becomes a direct issue for a particular implementation of a new business initiative for example so we want to be very aware that the the fitness is dynamic uh in using application portfolio management practices uh we can actually see that in and monitor and have an understanding so that's a a big feedback loop into is our architectural design our design still a good fit for the usage so using APM we can actually monitor this we can Pres present it we can think about technical debt as technical risk um and and so those risk can potentially be manifested and again being able to look at that holistically uh thinking about architectural Runway as managing that actively so we're aware of where those risk potentially will show up is really key to the underpinnings of business agility that's a really interesting point that you made there about things changing over time and something that that may be perfectly acceptable suddenly becomes a problem because of something else that's happening in the organization the way that the organization wants to evolve so application portfolio management clearly helps with that but I like what you said there about the architectural element as well that the technical teams can become more proactive in trying to prevent uh future technical debt in the way that they design and uh and develop the the future application so that they can trud anticipate those evolving needs and and plan solutions that can accommodate them that's right Annie and and by um you publishing patterns for example um and and you know federating experiences uh being able to uh create heat maps of of where these pain points are at and manage those and understand that those can change uh over time and they do of course change uh as does the remedy sometimes there's even better ways to to uh uh remediate or reduce or eliminate a tech a specific item that that we would consider technical debt so oh there's also governance handy around this as well so we always want to make sure that we're investing in you know reducing the right debt and that changes so that's why we want to continuously be planning at a portfolio level be thinking about well what's changed maybe at a quarterly um uh Cadence so we have to be aware that a decision that was made uh previous ly uh May no longer hold true and we also want to make sure that we have good governance around managing that technical dat it's very typical that uh organizations don't want to invest in reducing technical debt because it's much easier to look at what potential new Revenue might be uh versus something that might be a technical uh consideration and so it's important to have governance policies in place as well on how to manage the investment in technical debt so we're not underinvested nor over investing we want to make sure that we've got a holistic view of this absolutely and I think that's a key point that we've been focusing here on the technology elements of this but uh in the next podcast recording FR Fred and I going get back together again we're going to talk about some of the business implications of this because at the end of the day you know all these systems exist to drive value for the business and some of the problems that are built in that need to be solved are going to impact the the business performance so we're going to look a little bit more at at the relationship between technical debt and the business in our uh in our next version of this podcast so join us then thanks [Music] Amy e e hello everybody and welcome back I'm again joined by Fred champ and we're again going to talk about technical debt now that I understand it I want to talk more about it um so in this particular podcast we're going to look at how technical debt is managed how it's assessed how different things are prioritized specifically looking at it from a technology standpoint