Public sector teams are often constrained by short-term funding and procurement cycles.
A department may focus on launching an immediate digital service. But when a supplier contract ends, institutional memory can leave with it. A few years later, a new team may be asked to continue the work with different suppliers, different architecture, and many of the same constraints.
This cycle can produce working systems. It can also create something costly and often hard to see: technical debt.
In the public sector, technical debt is not just outdated code. It makes future changes more…