Backlog Hygiene: Keep SAP AMS Clean or It Will Rot

{
  "id": "ams-028",
  "title": "Backlog Hygiene: Keep SAP AMS Clean or It Will Rot",
  "hook": "A dirty backlog is silent technical debt. It consumes attention, hides priorities, and creates fake urgency.",
  "idea": "Modern SAP AMS treats the backlog like inventory: limited, reviewed, and intentionally reduced. If an item cannot be explained, justified, and scheduled — it should not exist.",
  "sap_specific_pathology": {
    "how_backlogs_rot": [
      "Tickets kept ‘just in case’",
      "Problems without quantified impact",
      "Changes with no owner or outdated context",
      "Old incidents reopened under new names",
      "Deferred work that everyone forgot they accepted"
    ]
  },
  "backlog_classes": {
    "active": {
      "definition": "Items with a named owner, next action, and review date",
      "rule": "This is the only part allowed to grow"
    },
    "candidate": {
      "definition": "Ideas, problems, or changes awaiting impact assessment",
      "rule": "Must be promoted or deleted within a fixed timebox"
    },
    "accepted_debt": {
      "definition": "Known issues consciously deferred",
      "rule": "Must have justification, owner, and review date"
    },
    "dead": {
      "definition": "Outdated, unclear, or superseded items",
      "rule": "Deleted without guilt"
    }
  },
  "hygiene_rules": [
    "No item survives without a clear ‘why’.",
    "If impact cannot be explained in one paragraph, delete or park.",
    "If context is older than one quarter, revalidate or kill.",
    "Repetition without a Problem record is a process failure."
  ],
  "backlog_review_cadence": {
    "weekly": [
      "Clean ‘candidate’ items: promote or delete",
      "Check WIP limits per board"
    ],
    "monthly": [
      "Reassess accepted debt",
      "Merge duplicates and overlapping items",
      "Demote stale Problems"
    ],
    "quarterly": [
      "Backlog reset: aggressive pruning",
      "Re-align backlog with top demand drivers"
    ]
  },
  "automation": {
    "copilot_moves": [
      "Detect duplicate or near-duplicate backlog items.",
      "Flag items with no updates or owners.",
      "Estimate ‘cost of delay’ for long-waiting items.",
      "Suggest merges, splits, or deletions."
    ],
    "outputs": [
      "Backlog rot score",
      "Deletion candidates list",
      "Debt register with aging"
    ]
  },
  "why_this_improves_everything": [
    "Planning becomes credible.",
    "Teams stop context-switching.",
    "Prioritization discussions get shorter and sharper."
  ],
  "anti_patterns_to_kill": [
    "Never deleting tickets",
    "Backlog as a memory dump",
    "Confusing ‘important’ with ‘unscheduled’"
  ],
  "metrics_that_expose_decay": [
    "Backlog age distribution",
    "Percent of items with no owner",
    "Accepted debt age",
    "WIP vs throughput ratio"
  ],
  "design_question": [
    "If we deleted half the backlog today, would delivery actually get worse — or better?"
  ],
  "meta": {
    "schema": "dkharlanau.dataset.byte",
    "schema_version": "1.1",
    "dataset": "ams",
    "source_project": "cv-ai",
    "source_path": "ams/ams-028.json",
    "generated_at_utc": "2026-02-03T14:33:32+00:00",
    "creator": {
      "name": "Dzmitryi Kharlanau",
      "role": "SAP Lead",
      "website": "https://dkharlanau.github.io",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "attribution": {
      "attribution_required": true,
      "preferred_citation": "Dzmitryi Kharlanau (SAP Lead). Dataset bytes: https://dkharlanau.github.io"
    },
    "license": {
      "name": "",
      "spdx": "",
      "url": ""
    },
    "links": {
      "website": "https://dkharlanau.github.io",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "contact": {
      "preferred": "linkedin",
      "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkharlanau"
    },
    "canonical_url": "https://dkharlanau.github.io/datasets/ams/ams-028.json",
    "created_at_utc": "2026-02-03T14:33:32+00:00",
    "updated_at_utc": "2026-02-03T15:29:02+00:00",
    "provenance": {
      "source_type": "chat_export_extraction",
      "note": "Extracted and curated by Dzmitryi Kharlanau; enriched for attribution and crawler indexing."
    },
    "entity_type": "ams_byte",
    "entity_subtype": "",
    "summary": "A dirty backlog is silent technical debt. It consumes attention, hides priorities, and creates fake urgency."
  }
}