How much tech debt are you living with?
The biggest challenge IT leaders face is moving their roadmap forward while still paying down tech debt from all of the projects and decisions that have come before. Every system integration, feature addition and line of code can lead to wasted hours and major delays down the line. Every strategic shift and leadership transition makes the pile bigger.
The truth is that much of this tech debt is avoidable.
It comes down to a key difference between:
- The time and resources required to DO THE WORK and
- The time and resources required to KNOW WHAT WORK TO DO
Many challenges boil down to just a few of the right keystrokes, but you could spend hours or days trying to figure out what those right keystrokes are.
The knowledge necessary to identify these solutions is often lost, buried, or held by someone who may not even be involved in the task at hand. When team members leave the company, much of that knowledge leaves with them. Typical approaches to sorting this out include:
- Digging through years of (often outdated) notes and documents
- Group meetings with anyone and everyone who might possibly know the answers
- Google and StackOverflow searches
- Calling in outside consultants
When the problem IS finally solved and the system is finally working, the typical reaction is to breathe a sigh of relief and move on to the next task on the giant to-do list. Ironically, even with the pain of the process fresh on everyone’s minds, immediately moving on like this just adds another piece to the pile of tech debt.
The key to cutting this debt and creating efficiency in your IT program is to capture key knowledge about systems, strategies and solutions as you go. Making the right knowledge easily accessible, and making knowledge sharing a part of your culture allows your team to move faster and deliver better solutions.
The scale of efficiency improvement can be massive. As an example, architectural engineering firm CECI used knowledge management to reduce the time spent solving emergent engineering problems by over 86 percent!