Season 2 - Episode 17 - Nicola Wadham – Dealing with technical debt & modernisation within tight budget constraints

Nicola’s career has been within organisations that build or make products; with IT as an enabler and a service. She has worked across multiple sectors including - Oil and Gas, FMCG, Engineering, Utilities and government regulatory bodies. Nicola has been a leader in many types of organisations from the very large enterprises to the very small and a range of sizes and ownership models in between. She focuses on organisation design, IT skills, acquisition and retention, sourcing strategy and governance dimension that are all part of the challenge of delivering IT enabled change. 

During this episode, we explore the definition of technical debt and its impact across the business.  Nicola explains more about how to manage when working with tight budgets and we explore how to decide whether to invest in modernising legacy systems or continue maintaining them, including the prioritisation and capacity question. 

Nicola explains when there are situations where she would recommend delaying a technical debt resolution and why so many modern solutions promise to address technical debt, but do they deliver on their promises, or do they sometimes add complexity?

Nicola was very kind and shared some examples from her own career, where modernisation efforts have gone wrong, either by increasing technical debt or complicating IT management.