This Playbook describes the benefits of configuring and running the Technical Debt Management Process, what it does and how it works. We explain how you can configure and run the process “out of the box”, and how to adapt it to your particular Ardoq metamodel.
All of the assets required to configure and run this process are included in the Technical Debt Management Solution. This process also connects to, and makes use of, the Application Risk Management Solution and the Initiative component from the Strategy to Execution Solution.
Table of contents
Who should use this Process Playbook
This playbook is for Enterprise Architects who want to automate their technical debt management processes, improve their organization’s approach to technical debt management and save considerable time and money for their organization.
Even though this document refers specifically to the technical debt management process, similar techniques can be applied to automate other governance processes with Ardoq. See Process Playbook: How to Automate Application Ownership and Process Playbook: How to Automate Application Risk Management for further examples that automate other governance processes.
Why you should configure and run this process
Effective Technical Debt Management involves identifying and recording technical debt, quantifying it so that it can be prioritized, and then tracking the initiatives that are being taken to remediate debt to ensure the debt is “paid off”.
This process does not help identify technical debt (for guidance on that, see Technical Debt: Purpose, Scope and Rationale and How to use Architecture Reviews to identify Technical Debt). It does ensure that once a debt item has been identified and quantified, the item is considered and the appropriate action is agreed. If that action is to plan remediation or address remediation, then the process will create an Initiative to implement the action and trigger an alert when the initiative is due to be completed. This way the Debt Item can be marked as remediated and any related Risks re-considered for lower likelihood or impact scores.
"Most organizations don’t know how to measure their tech debt,
much less how to actively manage it."
Dr Ken Knapton, Forbes Technology Council [1]
This automated process will ensure that you go beyond merely documenting technical debt to actively managing it. Without it, you risk having an expanding technical debt backlog that simply records an ever growing accumulation of debt and interest. Remediation is the key to reducing your spend on living with debt, reducing the drag on your agility and freeing up resources to address new business opportunities and challenges.
CIOs surveyed by McKinsey estimated that tech debt amounts to 20 to 40 percent of the value of their entire technology estate [2];
60 percent of CIOs surveyed by McKinsey on the topic felt their organization’s technical debt had risen perceptibly over the past three years [3];
Actively managing their tech debt can free up engineers to spend up to 50 percent more of their time on work that supports business goals [3].
Ardoq’s Technical Debt Management Process
This automated process, when configured and deployed, begins when a new Debt Item component is created, and runs continuously in the background until the Debt Item is assigned a Debt Action value of either Ignore or Remediated.
It ensures that new Debt Items are considered and assigned an agreed Debt Action, which may be Address, Plan, Delay or Ignore.
Where the agreed action is Address or Plan the process will require that the Debt Item is linked to an Initiative that will implement the action, creating a new one if an existing Initiative is not chosen.
Where a new Initiative is created, it will prompt a user to populate it with relevant descriptive data, such as timelines and budgets.
When a linked Initiative’s end date passes, it will prompt a user to review the Debt Item, advising that the item’s Debt Action should now be changed to Remediated.
When a Debt Item that impacts one or more Risk becomes Remediated, it will prompt the Risk owner to review the Risk with a view to reducing its Impact or Likelihood in the light of the debt’s remediation.
Where the agreed action is Delay the process will require the user to provide a future review date when they will automatically be prompted to reconsider the item and agree a new action.
Figure 1 below shows the process that is provided with the Technical Debt Solution. Details of how this can be configured and put into operation are provided later in this Playbook.
Figure 1: Ardoq’s Automated Technical Debt Management Process
Solution dependencies
This process is focused on taking action once a Debt Item has been identified, documented and quantified. It encourages you to go to the next stage, evaluate items, prioritize them and decide what action will be taken to remove them from the backlog. The process therefore requires the use of the Initiative component from the Strategy to Execution Solution. Debt Items are often the root cause of Risks, so the process optionally allows for an Impacts reference to be made to a Risk component (from the Application Risk Management Solution) and then tracked so that when a Debt Item that impacts a Risk has finally been remediated, the Risk owner is notified to review the Risk, so that its Impact and/or Likelihood can now be reduced, or the Risk removed from the Risk Register.
How it works
Just two types of asset combine to produce this quite complex process: Surveys and Broadcasts.
Surveys - Forms that gather information from people in different steps of the process. Their answers are used to add information to the model. These may take the form of references (such as creating Impacts links between a Debt Item and a Risk it is a cause of), or fields that add detailed information to a particular asset (such as to record the agreed action that will be taken following an analysis of the Debt Item).
Broadcasts - Highly configurable messages that can watch for specific situations and, when they occur, trigger a message to a person, for example asking them to complete a survey about a particular asset, or warning them about a situation that has arisen. For example, a request to review again a Debt Item and agree and record a new action when the original agreed action was Delay and we are now at the Next Review Date.
Figure 2 below shows how the Technical Debt Management Process of Figure 1 has been implemented with four Surveys and four Broadcasts. An advantage of Ardoq’s distributed workflow capability is that individual Broadcasts can be enabled or disabled so that as much or little of this process can be put into action as required. For example, if you have not deployed the Application Risk Management Solution and are not intending to link Debt Items to Risks, you can deploy a simplified process by disabling the weekly broadcast TD - Reduce Risk.
Figure 2: The process in terms of Ardoq assets
The Surveys
Four surveys are used to support the Technical Debt Management Process:
TD - Debt Item Details: This survey is used to add a new Debt Item or update an existing one. The Survey also allows a Debt Item to be deleted. The Survey questions are:
Debt Item: Name and description.
Debt Item Type: Classifying the Debt Item by choosing a characteristic from the quality model.
Identify Assets Impacted by the Debt Item: These may be Applications, Application Modules, Data Stores, Technology Services or Servers.
Identify any known Risks that are affected by the Debt Item.
Estimate the current cost implications of living with the Debt Item, by selecting one of the following options:
Minor inconvenience
Hours per month
Days per month
An extra person
Significant business cost
Estimate the negative business impact should the unthinkable happen in a “worst case scenario”. This is a number in the range 1.0 to 5.0.
Estimate the likelihood of the unthinkable happening. This is a number in the range 1.0 to 5.0.
Estimate the approximate cost of fixing the debt by selecting one of the following options:
Up to 1 week
Up to 1 month
Up to 3 months
Up to 6 months
More than 6 months
TD - Debt Action: This simple Survey is used to record the agreed action being taken to address the debt, or to indicate that the Debt Item has been remediated. It displays the Recommended Debt Action, which indicates which quadrant the Debt Item falls within on the Gartner PAID model (Plan, Address, Ignore or Delay) [4]. The main question asks the user to select the action they’ve decided to take.
The options are:
Address
Plan
Delay
Ignore
Remediated
Choosing Ignore or Remediated indicates that no further action will be taken to address the Debt Item, and it will not be included in visualizations or reports that focus on “Live Debt”. Choosing Address or Plan will cause a further question to appear, asking the user to name a new Initiative or select an existing one that will address the Debt Item. Choosing Delay will also cause a further question to appear, asking the user to name the date when the action for this Debt Item should be reconsidered.
TD - Initiative Details: This Survey is used to add details to any new Initiative that may have been created in the TD - Debt Action Survey described above. It contains advanced search criteria that limit the set of Initiatives shown to those that are missing Active Period dates.
The criteria are:
The Initiative Stage is not equal to Discovery (such initiatives will correctly have missing Active Period dates)
AND
The Active Period Start or End dates are empty
The Survey asks the user to provide all the descriptive fields of the Initiative.
RM - Risk Details Survey: This is an existing Survey from the Application Risk Management Solution. It is used to update the details of an existing Risk component. In the context of this process, it is used to review an existing Risk that was impacted by a Debt Item after the Debt Item has been remediated. See Process Playbook: How to Automate Application Risk Management for more details of this Survey.
The Broadcasts
Four Broadcasts are used to choreograph the process:
TD - Specify Actions
This Broadcast asks a central authority (the owner of the Technical Debt Backlog) to record the action that is being taken to address the Debt Item using the TD - Debt Action Survey.
The Broadcast will fire in two circumstances:
When a Debt Item is found that has an empty Debt Action field
When the Next Review Date of the Debt Item has passed (indicating that the current Debt Action is Delay and it is now time for the action to be reconsidered)
By default, the Broadcast will run monthly.
TD - New Initiative
This Report Alert Broadcast will fire if there are any Debt Items on the TD - Incomplete Initiative addressing Technical Debt Report. The Report lists all Initiatives that impact a Debt Item and are missing either Active Period Start or End dates. It is not possible to specify this precise condition in a Survey Broadcast, so the recipient will be directed to the Report and will then have to manually open the TD - Initiative Details Survey to supply the missing information. By default, the Broadcast runs weekly.
TD - Action Complete
This Broadcast invites a central authority (the owner of the Technical Debt Backlog) to mark a Debt Item as Remediated using the TD - Debt Action Survey. It fires when the Active Period End Date of an Initiative that Impacts a Debt Item has occurred within the past month. By default, the Broadcast will run monthly.
TD - Reduce Risk
This Broadcast looks for Risks that are Impacted by Debt Items that have become Remediated in the past week. The filter rules look at two fields on the Impacts reference, checking for a Last Reviewed date within the past week and the Remediated checkbox field being checked. In these circumstances, it sends the RM - Risk Details Survey to the owner of the Risk, advising that the Risk should be reviewed in the light of the fact that the impacting Debt Item has now been Remediated. By default, the Broadcast will run weekly.
How to configure and run it
This section describes the few steps needed to configure the Surveys and Broadcasts and make the whole process live.
Edit each of the three TD Surveys and add a suitable contact email address in the General information Section. Save each Survey, ensuring they are made Live.
Because Debt Items can be linked to a wide range of component types, you may need to change the TD - Debt Item Details Survey to align to your metamodel, depending on the related Solutions that you have, or have not, deployed. See Technical Debt Management: Solution Configuration Guide for details.
Edit each of the four Broadcasts and in the Compose message section, add a suitable Sender’s email address and review the message content to ensure that it suits the culture and style of your organization.
In addition, when editing the TD - Specify Actions, TD - Action Complete and TD - New Initiative Broadcasts, in Select audience choose the central authority that has responsibility for technical debt as the recipient of the survey links (the owner of the Technical Debt Backlog).
Select Launch Broadcast to make each Broadcast live.
Open the Survey TD - Initiative Details and click on the Existing Entries button. Copy the URL for this page. Now navigate to the Reports Overview page and open the Report TD - Incomplete Initiatives addressing Technical Debt. Edit the Report (top-right corner of the page) and in the Report description paste the Survey URL, replacing the words “Replace this text with Survey URL”. Save the report.
That’s it! Your Technical Debt Management Process is now running.
Adapting the process to fit your organization
Unlike the Application Ownership Process, this process does not use a calculated field to maintain the process state and orchestrate the process. Each Broadcast in the process is independent, and can therefore be turned on or off to meet your particular requirements.
Not using the Application Risk Management Solution
If you are not using the Application Risk Management Solution then you can remove the relevant question from TD - Debt Item Details Survey and disable the TD - Reduce Risk Broadcast. You will also want to remove the corresponding widget from the TD - Technical Debt Dashboard.
Not using Initiative components to track actions
If you are not intending to track actions to address technical debt with Initiative components, you can remove the relevant question from TD - Debt Item Details Survey, disable the TD - New Initiative and TD - Action Complete Broadcasts, and ignore the TD - Incomplete Initiatives addressing Technical Debt Report and TD - Initiative Details Survey. You will also want to remove the corresponding widgets from the two Dashboards.
Technical Debt ownership
We decided not to add ownership to the Debt Item component type. Our assumption here is that technical debt is managed centrally, and so Broadcasts are sent to a nominated central authority (except for the TD - Reduce Risk Survey, which is sent to the Risk Owner).
Some organizations may prefer to distribute ownership of technical debt to different members of application teams, or perhaps on the basis of the Debt Type. A simple way to address this would be to add a Reference Question to the TD - Debt Item Details Survey that assigns a Person component as Owner of the Debt Item. The Broadcasts TD - Specify Actions, TD - Action Complete and TD - New Initiative could all then be sent to the Debt Item Owner.
Bibliography
[1] K. Knapton, “Measuring And Managing Technical Debt,” Forbes. Accessed: Feb. 09, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2022/08/10/measuring-and-managing-technical-debt/
[2] McKinsey DIgital, “Demystifying digital dark matter: A new standard to measure and tame technical debt,” McKinsey Digital. Accessed: Feb. 09, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/demystifying-digital-dark-matter-a-new-standard-to-tame-technical-debt
[3] V. Dalal, K. Krishnakanthan, B. Münstermann, and R. Patenge, “Tech Debt: Reclaiming tech equity.” Accessed: Feb. 09, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/tech-debt-reclaiming-tech-equity
[4] S. Van Der Zijden, H. Dodd, A. Thomas, and Egiazarov, “How to Prioritize and Sell Technical Debt Remediation.” Gartner, Sep. 2023. [Online]. Available: Doc ID G00798329