Senior IS Project Manager| Baycare Health SystemsClearwater, Fl, United States
Normally we would look at a business case and return on investment (ROI), but there are times when compliance or legal directives must be addresses and well as issues with technical debt. How does your organization manage this backlog?
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Shumaila SadafLegal Advisor| Billions works SMC Pvt LTDKarachi, Pakistan
Organizations manage this backlog by prioritizing compliance and legal items first as mandatory work. Then they use value-based scoring methods (like WSJF or priority ranking) for business and technical debt items. Many teams also allocate fixed capacity for technical debt in each sprint to avoid system degradation while keeping alignment with business goals. Saving Changes...
Program Manager| HARPER SRLSanto Domingo / Distrito Nacional, Dominican Republic
Compliance usually comes first because it’s not optional. After that, what helps is making trade-offs visible. Business value, risk, and technical debt all compete, so having that conversation explicitly makes prioritization clearer. Saving Changes...
Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
Compliance, Legal, Security are the key mainly in today IT projects where all is about generative AI. With that said, the focus is not project, the focus is solution. So, we prioritize solutions which will address strategic themes. Just to comment, solution is equal to "the thing" to be created plus "the way" to create it (you can call this "project") Saving Changes...
Treating all of those purely through ROI often creates unhealthy behavior because some work is existential, not optional.
What has worked best in environments I’ve been part of is establishing explicit prioritization tiers and governance rules up front. For example:
Tier 1 — Mandatory Work Compliance, legal, security vulnerabilities, critical incidents → automatically prioritized with dedicated capacity and escalation paths
Tier 2 — Operational Sustainability Technical debt, resiliency, scalability, platform modernization → evaluated based on risk of delay, operational impact, and future delivery friction
Tier 3 — Business / Strategic Value Revenue growth, customer experience, strategic capabilities → prioritized using value, alignment, urgency, and capacity trade-offs
The important part is making the trade-offs visible.
Otherwise technical debt silently accumulates because business initiatives almost always present better short-term ROI slides.
A few things I’ve seen help significantly: • reserving fixed engineering capacity for platform/debt work • quarterly portfolio reviews instead of ad hoc prioritization • explicitly tracking “cost of delay” for technical debt • separating “run the business” from “change the business” capacity • forcing executive visibility into dependency and risk impacts
The organizations that handle this well usually stop treating prioritization as a backlog exercise and start treating it as a portfolio governance discipline. Saving Changes...
Organizations prioritize IT requirements based on business value (ROI), compliance/legal needs, and risk impact. Critical items like security and regulatory issues are addressed first, while others are ranked through governance frameworks and strategic alignment. Saving Changes...
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