Abstract: With the development of technology, enterprise IT projects are becoming increasingly complex. Although project managers strongly recommend enhancing flexibility by focusing on technological excellence and good design, practitioners are often seen to build up technical debt in order to deliver the project sooner. Therefore, it is important for project managers to find how to balance the strategic advantages and the benefit loss of recipients brought by technical debt. Based on the theory of technical debt and scenario-response model, two evolutionary game models are established with one taking recipients' benefits into consideration and the other not. The evolutionary equilibrium strategies of project implementers and recipients are explored and simulated by MATLAB under different technical debt scenarios and different coping strategies, after which conclusions and suggestions are put forward. In the short term, enterprises can gain competitive advantages by strategically generating technical debt. However, serious technology debt may lead to non-maintainability and non-resolvability of the system, resulting in huge repayment costs. Enterprises should choose appropriate guidance schemes according to different stages of technical debt evolution. In the long run, serious technical debt scenario is a strict poor policy for the project recipients. Enterprises should avoid the serious technical debt in order to maximize customer revenues and achieve sustainable win-win development.

Key words: IT project management, technical debt, evolutionary game