The Phoenix Project on Tech Debt
Gene lays out the “4 types of work”:
- Feature projects
- Internal projects
- Planned changes
- Unplanned work
Using this framework, he then is able to talk about the cost of technical debt.
If an organization doesn’t pay down its technical debt, every calorie in the organization can be spent just paying interest, in the form of unplanned work. As you know, unplanned work is not free, … Quite the opposite. It’s very expensive, because unplanned work comes at the expense of … Planned work. (Kim, Behr, and Spafford 2018)
This unplanned work hurts the organization in two ways: slower than expected execution on planned projects and increased frequency and severity of incidents.I was amazed by how neatly these two framings aligned with my old sales mentors’s top 2 ways of framing a sale.
At a certain point, an organization will enter the “IT capacity death spiral”
When all you do is react, there’s not enough time to do the hard mental work of figuring out whether you can accept new work. So, more projects are crammed onto the plate, with fewer cycles available to each one, which means more bad multitasking, more escalations from poor code, which mean more shortcuts. (Kim, Behr, and Spafford 2018)