Technical debt and project priorities can change over time. Regularly reassess both to ensure your approach remains aligned with the project’s goals. Including technical debt discussion in project's retrospectives is good to ensure the team reflects on past decisions and adjusts future priorities accordingly.

The key is re-prioritising by following the MoSCoW principle of must-have, should-have, could-have, and won't-have. Based on the new priorities and the deadline, work backwards to break down the scope and establish regular reviews to ensure expectations are being met. As well, it is critical to communicate the new priorities and regular updates to all key stakeholders. Should the priorities push the deadline, it is very important that this is communicated early enough to establish if additional resources are required if the deadline is a hard stop.

Balancing technical debt with project deadlines requires a strategic approach. Start by assessing the impact of technical debt on current and future work, prioritizing fixes that enhance performance, security, or maintainability. Utilize a debt register to track and classify debt by urgency and impact. Incorporate small, manageable debt resolutions into your sprint planning to prevent accumulation. Maintain transparent communication with stakeholders about trade-offs and risks to ensure debt management does not compromise project timelines.

It is important to visualize LCM / Technical work as well as the development you "want" to focus on, for example development which generates client or business value or increases security. Visualizing work allows you do better planning as well as have fact-based discussions of resource allocation.

The very first decision organizations should make is if they are ready to focus and invest on this topic. Because reporting on it, overwhelming their teams with line items, pushing them to constantly meet to talk about it without a plan or commitment to invest on decreasing it, only creates unecessary costs. Secondly, it's important to decide which of those will actually "break" the business if not dealt with. These should take priority over some client business. How good is your solution if your systems can't support it? Lastly, organizations thay are ready to focus on tech debt, should dedicate a small team to work on it, only shared with internal work. Otherwise, client teams will always look outside first.