Technical debt is a common yet unnoticed problem that businesses face.
It’s when businesses encounter IT troubles and seek “harmless” patch-up solutions so their operations aren’t interrupted.
However, these shortcuts later accumulate into a substantial burden for the business and affect them beyond the IT department.
This article covers technical debt. It discusses the business cost of temporary solutions and the best IT practices to avoid them.
Let’s Understand Technical Debt – What Is It?
Technical debt occurs when companies go for quick and temporary IT solutions to address immediate challenges but end up sacrificing long-term quality.
These “quick fixes” accumulate over time to become a tangled web of inefficiencies that are too costly to solve. Eventually, they become too big a problem to ignore.
Companies end up paying a lot more money and time to fix them than they would if they prioritised sustainability over speed. Just to give you an idea – 40% of small businesses reported a cyberattack in 2023. That’s a huge number.
If you don’t prepare, you may end up paying huge prices as technical debts. Let’s help you avoid them.
Here are 7 strategies to implement for smoother operations and minimised technical debt.
Let’s save your businesses from unwanted IT mess!
1. Identify and Rank Issues Causing Technical Debt
Identifying the root cause is the first step to solving any problem. Unfortunately, so many businesses never realise how badly technical debts impact their operations.
It’s only when you identify the problem areas that you understand how you’re wasting thousands of dollars for nothing. Here’s a protocol to follow:
Conduct a Technical Debt Audit
Conduct a thorough analysis of your IT system. You can set up a timeline – a year, the last six months, or a quarter – and look for recurring lapses in that time frame. Be it with maintenance, infrastructure, documentation, etc.
Debt auditing will give you the necessary data to start addressing the issues.
It’s crucial to be true about the debt audit. It’s good practice to mention anything that could even be slightly concerning.
You can always dig down deeper and discard something later if it’s not a serious issue. But, skipping something as “non-significant” in the initial stages can result in misidentifying a huge issue.
If you lack a dedicated IT department or technical auditing expertise, it’s always a wise option to seek external help. The professionals will help you with auditing, offer suggestions, and even resolve issues.
Rank Issues In Order of Priority
Once you have the list of troubles ready, arrange them in order of priority.
You can rank them according to what hurts your business ROI from most to least. Or you can rank them according to the time needed to resolve something. Businesses usually have time, budget & resource constraints.
So, rank the list in an order that best serves your business.
Register Progress Technical Debt
Tracking progress for solutions is as important as highlighting issues. Ensure that every action for improvement is documented.
This way, you can efficiently solve ongoing technical debt issues while minimising risks for the future.
You can also make it a weekly practice to review progress with the IT team and find efficient ways to handle technical debt.
2. Make Debt Management A Routine
Your IT side of business will always have hiccups, no matter what you do.
It’s best to embrace them and implement best practices to reduce the damage they cause to the business. In fact, if you have technical debts adjusted, you’ll have smooth operations and the issues won’t even harm your progress. Here’s an idea of how to implement a debt management routine:
Prioritise Technical Debt Management
Once you have everything sorted with audits, don’t wait for the next disaster. Make technical debt management a routine by setting a specific timeframe for regular IT reviews.
This will help you identify and address issues quickly before they become bigger and cause more noticeable damage.
Have Scheduled Repair Times
If your business assumes 100% IT uptime, it will struggle with smooth operations. There will be issues no matter what you do. Planning time for IT repairs and downtime will keep you prepared.
If nothing happens, you’ll have more time for work. But if something comes up, you’ll not panic but will be equipped to address the issues.
Track Progress:
Technical debt management aims to minimise it to the best possible extent. Tracking progress as a routine keeps you safe from unexpected mishaps. It’ll also reduce your probability of encountering IT outages and other issues.
Thus lowering your technical debt.
Metrics for every business differ based on services, competencies, and priorities.
So, ensure that your IT department customises the management routine for your business. Or, you can outsource this task to IT experts so you can focus on routine operations and not worry about handling technical debt on your own.
3. Emphasise on Collaboration & Documentation
Your employees can play a huge role in reducing your technical debt. For that, you’ll need proper protocols in place and ensure that employees follow them.
It all begins with making your staff members aware about technical debt and how it can harm the business. Here’s how collaboration & documentation can address the issue.
Training Employees
Conduct training sessions for employees where you make them aware of the concept and share the best practices to avoid them. Customise the training sessions for problems specific to your business.
For example, if employees continuously have troubles with their two-factor authorization, then share solutions for that.
Or, if a new tech suite, such as Microsoft 365, is in place, share its best practices – like how to keep data safe, how to collaborate better, and tips to use Copilot for quicker work.
All these will make your operations efficient and less time dealing with technical difficulties.
Make Knowledge Sharing a Habit
Encourage teams to talk about technical challenges and solutions they implement. You can’t always control the difficulties on an individual level. So, holding regular meetings and encouraging employees to share their solutions can help minimise losses for you.
And if you discover something interesting, you can make it a standard practice for everyone to follow.
Document Operations For Improvements
Document your current operations. This will give you a reference point for future changes and show how you’ve improved over time.
Be comprehensive with documentation. Include everything, including hardware configurations, application codes, collaboration processes, network diagrams, and software stacks used.
Once done, keep updating them regularly as you make any changes in your operation or implement something new.
Documenting changes on the go will always keep you updated and you’ll never risk missing out things because they piled on.
If you expect the documentation to be a collaborative effort, it’s best to use a template to standardise things from the start.
4. Plan Your Updates
Don’t wait until updates become mandatory. Be systematic about them.
Businesses that are strategic about their IT updates can significantly reduce their technical debts.
Schedule Updates
Well-planned updates can give your business a significant boost in productivity and resources.
For example, schedule the updates when business usually experiences downtime. This way you’ll not have to worry about updates amidst time-sensitive projects.
Don’t Rush
Go incremental with your updates. If you try to do it all at once, there’s higher chances of outages and losing efficiency. Mark the critical updates first which will impact your business the most.
Then, start working on them in the order of priority. Don’t ignore this.
Randomly updating your IT infrastructure is an inefficient way. You may think you are reducing technical debt, but you may as well be adding fuel to the fire.
Also, make them bite-sized. Plan updates over a certain period. Trying to do a complete overhaul in 2 days, for example, will take a lot of work. Unless of course that’s the last option and you have the necessary resources to monitor the updates and act promptly if anything goes wrong.
Otherwise, there’s no need to take such high risks. Incremental updates are definitely easier and more manageable.
5. Don’t Forsake Security
Security breaches are becoming more common every day, whether caused by mobile malware or complete hits on your business’s IT systems.
So, ignoring your security can significantly contribute to your technical debts.
A surprising stat shows that 33% of businesses opt for free security solutions rather than advanced-level professional options. They’re literally operating at the mercy of hackers, and it’s only a question of when the disaster strikes.
By optimising security, you prevent unwanted troubles and ensure that you don’t leave holes for malicious actors to enter.
Conduct Security Audits
Always be aware of your IT security levels. Auditing your security will help you identify leaks that you can work on. Ensure that you analyse everything thoroughly, such as firewalls, encryption, mobile device security, etc.
Once you have the report ready, it’s time to take action. Contact us if you want a strong security audit that’ll catch loopholes you have in your IT operations.
Implement Security Best Practices
In light of the report you get, see the areas for improvement. Remember, security lapses can happen by mistake or on purpose. A simple blunder of an employee leaving their phone unlocked can compromise your data.
Or someone wanting to cause damage can easily do so if your IT security is weak.
By implementing security best practices, you’ll ensure enough layers to protect your organisation on autopilot.
For example, using admin permissions for sharing sensitive data over email. Or restricting access to important data to only highly trusted individuals.
By setting admin rights and automating your security via software and protocols, you can also catch security lapses early on and handle them before them cause heavy damages.
If your resources are slim, you can always outsource your organisational security to IT experts who will act as an extended team for a fraction of the cost compared to an in-house team.
6. Maintain Dependence Integrity
Businesses rely on several IT solutions to operate smoothly. Of course, most SMBs can’t afford to have all the solutions in-house.
So, these solutions are often external third-party software that are crucial for operation. The issues occur when the importance of certain services is not calculated.
Some IT solutions can halt operations completely, while with others, things are manageable until issues are fixed.
Therefore, calibrating your dependence on IT solutions is crucial and that’s what’s meant by maintaining dependence integrity.
The goal of dependence integrity is to build a system that keeps businesses operational and everything shouldn’t come crashing down if some service or software crashes.
Score Your Dependence
Rank the external factors you are dependent on.
The highly critical ones for your business operations must always be updated and dealt with as a priority.
For example, if your website is built on WordPress, you must immediately consider updating it whenever a newer version is launched. You must also plan to update your plugins and custom codes with it.
Handle Appropriately
Some dependencies need critical treatment. Ensure that you have the necessary automation and dependence handling strategies to avoid the high costs of mismanaged technical debt.
Also, it’s highly recommended that you document all your dependencies. Businesses can experience headaches when an emergency strikes and they don’t have a document in place to handle it.
7. Strive for Continuous Improvement
This is the last but important strategy for building sustainable IT operations for your business: striving for continuous improvement.
IT developments are happening rapidly. Businesses that want to stay current will definitely implement newer solutions and technologies.
But, handling them without a plan can lead to high technical debts.
Continuous improvements mean implementing a culture of learning, sharing, and regularly reflecting on opportunities for improvement. Managing technical debt isn’t a one-day or a one-year job.
It’s a process that needs constant maintenance. Through regular dialogues, training, and collaborations, you can develop the best solutions to keep your companies almost free of technical debts.
Wrapping Up – Technical Debt Can Be Deadly If Ignored
Unfortunately, many businesses still are unaware of the harms of technical debt.
But it can be a silent killer that damages business profits, productivity, efficiency, and even employee morale. Plus, it puts your data at a high risk of getting compromised.
Managing everything in-house requires a proficient team that can cost your business a fortune. That’s why many businesses avoid it. But that won’t reduce the harms of technical debts.
If you want to service your technical debts without paying high costs for them, the best option is to hire IT experts like PowerbITs.
From conducting audits to training employees about IT best practices, we offer 360° tailored IT solutions so businesses can focus on growth.
Don’t get stopped by IT issues that are easily fixable under expert vigilance.
Contact us immediately to learn more about enhancing your IT operations and eliminating blockades!
