Technical debt poses significant business risks, reducing agility, slowing innovation, and causing lost opportunities. Addressing it is crucial for long-term organisational success.
If your business truly understood the risk of technical debt, you wouldn’t accept any of it.
There’s a myth that “some level of technical debt is manageable.” But let’s be clear—technical debt is 100% risk. It’s an unhedged fund with no asset securing it, no insurance to mitigate it. The cost isn’t just in future refactoring; it’s in lost time, lost agility, and lost opportunities.
At Microsoft, TFS was delivered on a two-year cycle. By 2012, with 600 engineers, they were shipping just 24 features a year. Technical debt had turned a powerhouse into a bottleneck. It wasn’t until they embraced 3-week Sprints and tackled the underlying debt that they regained agility.
This isn’t just an engineering problem. It’s a business problem. If you think you can hide technical debt in a cost centre forever, think again.
How does your organisation treat technical debt? As a calculated risk or an unrecognised liability?
If you've made it this far, it's worth connecting with our principal consultant and coach, Martin Hinshelwood, for a 30-minute 'ask me anything' call.
We partner with businesses across diverse industries, including finance, insurance, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, technology, engineering, transportation, hospitality, entertainment, legal, government, and military sectors.
Flowmaster (a Mentor Graphics Company)
CR2
Akaditi
Sage
Alignment Healthcare
Workday
MacDonald Humfrey (Automation) Ltd.
Brandes Investment Partners L.P.
Kongsberg Maritime
Lockheed Martin
Milliman
Lean SA
Boeing
Qualco
Schlumberger
Emerson Process Management
Slaughter and May
Big Data for Humans
Royal Air Force
Nottingham County Council
Ghana Police Service
New Hampshire Supreme Court
Department of Work and Pensions (UK)
Washington Department of Transport
Sage
Big Data for Humans
Flowmaster (a Mentor Graphics Company)
Lean SA
Teleplan
Healthgrades
