Here are some questions I’ve received when presenting the Constraint Anchor term.

It’s been great to talk through this several times with others. Also, I’ve appreciated all the questions, feedback and wondering.

I’m paraphrasing to be concise, but here they are:

“Aren’t there more than just Planning and Delivery?”

Yes, there are more categories of work besides just Planning and Delivery, but I see the other categories being inside of Planning and Delivery.

Planning is… Making the right work clear, aligned, and ready to start, and goals defined. Delivery is… Turning that planned work into finished outcomes at a consistent pace.

Now, the categories are not the people or the roles in planning/delivery, but the work people do that holds up future work.

While some people/roles do more planning than delivery, there are many boxes to check off when completing projects and delivering to our customers.

“Isn’t capacity on both Planning and Delivery?”

Yes, absolutely. Capacity also affects Supply and Demand. Also, people and roles fall in both Planning/Delivery and Supply/Demand.

I would imagine that if there was more demand than supply, everybody that was working on supply would start working on demand.

Same for a team when there is more delivery capacity than planning. Everybody doing delivery work would need to work on more planning to fill the delivery capacity.

“Can’t developers also do planning work?”

Yes, Planning and Delivery is less about a person or role, and more about the work that holds up future work…ultimately the Delivery.

“How do you know which is the constraint?”

Two things: more and metrics.

More: If you just added more, or 10x, ideas/requests/support-tickets, which would gum up the works first: Planning or Delivery?

Metrics: It’s hard to diagnose or scale what we’re not tracking.