Tips to keep your technical debt to a minimum

  • 12 April 2022
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dklinger
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In another thread? I talk about technical debt and how Docebo works to resolve aspects of it with the community.

An important point that a spin on technical debt is the amount of overhead an implementation builds into its workflows to support its business.

Let me mention 5 tips to minimize your overhead and maybe others can add on to the thread over time.

  1. integrate your user creation and termination (minimizing user creation) 
  2. Leverage an SSO if your organization has one (minimizing authentication concerns)…login will always be the highest level concern with a system - if you can offload this to your IT / Service Desk folk - that is one less concern to come to you.
  3. Leverage PUs - give out roles to people to minimize and decentralize common operations (course curation, “lookup and assist”, and reporting roles are three common ones…)
  4. Leverage Enrollment Rules - minimizing your deploying by hand learning for roaming scenarios like new hire training..
  5. As you aim to implement? Host a master document to reflect your configuration on paper of your users and groups.

6 replies

Bfarkas
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  1. Track all CSS changes centrally
Bfarkas
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  1. Log any api usage. Both when and what, this helps manage the limitation of 1k calls an hour and easily track impact when endpoints are update/subset. 
dklinger
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  1. Leverage codes and naming conventions everywhere (learning objects, courses, LPs, categories, even where they are not available - like with groups). Just like other HRIS systems, your shorthand will have you navigating your objects effectively and keeping your searches down to a minimum - downtime related to searching is real when you are 100s to 1000s of configurations deep. Think about if you had to remove the detail from the system….codes and naming conventions.are what will relate detail to the next.
dklinger
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  1. Avoid proposing high-touch solutions for your organization that dont really fit. Your technical debt can go up considerably if you are not continuously thinking about “the how”. Ensure that you help to deploy a solution that is using as many of the tips above as possible to keep your solutions down to low-touch (configurations) to no-touch approaches (integrations).
Bfarkas
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  1. Avoid proposing high-touch solutions for your organization that dont really fit. Your technical debt can go up considerably if you are not continuously think about “the how”. Ensure that you help to deploy a solution that is using as many of the tips above as possible to keep your solutions down to low-touch (configurations) to no-touch approaches (integrations).

Love this, I had a manager who used to ask us to submit a “Ongoing support time” for anything added that required any type of manual intervention, adjustment, monitoring, etc. and you would have to justify it against a time budget similar to a normal monetary budget. If you over spent your budget it meant you were doing far too much technical debt essentially.

Bfarkas
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  1. Track and localization tool changes externally. 

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