Paying down technical debt at scale

Context

Technical debt was adding cost and slowing delivery across software teams.

The work reached teams across imaging, oncology, informatics and cloud platforms. One shared application codebase had about 20% duplicated code. Duplication like that means every fix has to be made in several places, and defects slip through.

The decision

The program combined technical debt reduction with resource optimization across teams, and tracked the result as realized savings.

The key decision was to pay the debt down in steps inside normal delivery, on a three-year roadmap agreed with business stakeholders, instead of stopping for a rewrite. Each step had to show a measured result, which kept the business funding it.

What I did, and what the team did

I was lead coach for the program in the Software Center of Excellence, working with teams on technical debt reduction and resource optimization. The teams did the work. In 2021 the program realized about €2M in savings and identified about €3M more in future savings.

I introduced the duplication and reliability analysis tooling, trained teams to run it and compiled the results for leadership. I proposed a code reliability analyzer and drove its adoption in four business groups, which found and removed about 18,000 lines of duplicate code.

Outcome

• ~€3M

  further savings opportunity identified

  Identified in 2021 as future savings, not revenue.

What I would do again

Transformation is not about erasing the past but evolving it with purpose. Understand the system you inherited, change it in steps you can measure, and put the savings in terms the business already uses.