Managing your technical debt can help to reduce the overall cost of a new mobile app

The current Covid-19 crisis is a sobering time for anyone at a professional and personal level. Many businesses have seen a downturn in overall customer engagement and find themselves with simply not enough work to go around. The UK government has introduced various cost reducing initiatives to support businesses during this challenging period. But some sectors have been crippled by not being able to respond and adapt quickly enough, resulting in 1000s of employees at risk or uncertain of their future. Being able to reshape and resize your organisation is the key to survival with technology an enabler to improve efficiencies and generate new revenue streams.

Forrester reported that keeping mobile apps maintained typically consumes 70% or more of the technology budget. Is there a way to break this down and reduce those costs?

Prioritise your technical debt

We all accumulate technical debt, and this is a perfect opportunity to make some real impact on those items that previously you couldn’t afford to do operationally. This is usually due to priority projects and business as usual getting in the way resulting in you simply not having the manpower or focus for technical debt tasks.

If you don’t have a technical debt register then you could start there, look to pick off those low hanging fruit tasks and see where it takes you.

• Map out that end to end process.
• Go for that fresh new look and feel.
• Automate your top 5 most painful tasks.
• Build that new platform and finally decommission the old one.

Improve your security posture

This is where you can do some real spring cleaning and air out those skeletons in the closet. Utilise your free resources to do a deep dive into what improvements you can make from security stand point. This doesn’t need to be a total lockdown but having a good understanding of what lies beneath is a good starting place.

Working towards an accreditation, penetration testing of key online assets or work security awareness by delivering security awareness training internally. These can be achieved either in house with the right resources or by bringing in external help through security consultancy to avoid marking all your own work.

Get creative with your technical approach

Try regular hackathons with a diverse mix of people from across your business. Encouraging collaboration with teams that don’t typically work together with a shared goal or idea can create new value or smarter ways of working. These could be used to explore a new approach, new product, an internal tool, or just a social strategy for when lockdown finally ends.

Now is the time to address these issues and try new initiatives with a view to strengthen your technical capability. Vidatec regularly conducts technical audits with its clients across their mobile and web app estates.