What is your team’s constraint?

A business has the constraints of supply and demand. This is common knowledge. These are fundamental. They are binary. If you decide what constraint the business has, the conversation is much more narrow. Not 10 constraints, but supply or demand.

If a business is constantly optimizing for supply or demand, what can the teams in the business optimize?

What are the fundamental constraints of a team?

I’ve come to these two: Planning and Delivery.

Teams stall for one of two reasons: they don’t have an actionable plan, or they can’t deliver on the plan.

This binary option helps narrow down to half of the problems a team can discuss.

So, let’s narrow down beyond planning and delivery…

A. If planning constrained, ask if the issues are here: ideas/requirements, documents and if shared, clear priorities or approval, frequent reworking on what to do, collaboration between teams.

B. If delivery constrained, ask if there are: capacity issues (skills, headcount, available time, tools, purchases), activity issues (too much WIP, blockers, dependencies, interruptions/meetings, team culture).

For a high-functioning team, planning and delivery could be their strengths, and for such a great team they would continue to optimize, right? They would pick one of the team’s constraints to optimize.

So, do you know your team’s constraint?

Ask your team to vote on what the constraint is, for options of how to solve the constraint, and then make that the focus.