Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

Dec 20, 2021·8 min read

Knowing where to look for problems by figuring out who reports up to whom

“Let’s see…. no backups, twenty convoluted stored procedures and old C++ code”

After a couple years in government I used to blow peoples’ minds with a fairly simple party trick. Before going into our first meeting with a new agency stakeholder I would predict several key details of what their problems were going to be. All I needed was the name and title of the person we were meeting.