Have you thought lately about what constraints your team operates under? Beyond time, budget and scope, teams face additional constraints both externally and internally imposed. Constraints can help or hinder your initiative.

Helpful Constraints

First, let’s consider a potentially helpful constraint — a deadline. Samuel Johnson famously said, “The prospect of being hung in a fortnight sharpens the mind.” Deadlines make clear your priorities. Johnson’s observation likely explains why two weeks is the most popular Sprint length!

Likewise a size constraint can be useful. Jeff Hawkins, the designer of the Palm Pilot, an early pocket computer, reportedly carried around a block of wood to represent the device and continued to cut shavings off the block until it was reduced to a size and shape that he felt comfortable carrying in his pocket. The idea of conveniently carrying around a computer, sans briefcase, backpack, or purse, ultimately led to the proliferation of smartphones we see today.

Despite the interesting reverse trend to larger and larger smartphones and tablets, the future of smartphones is likely to be a device that we wear and integrates into our lives in a way that we hardly notice that it’s there except when we intentionally interact with it. The constraint of being non-obtrusive leads to devices that are more likely to be carried with us and thus more likely to be used.

Harmful Constraints

What about harmful constraints? Does it make sense to artificially constrain a team from having the people that it needs to deliver? Consider a football team playing in the big game. Imagine that they have the ball on their opponent’s 14 yard line and there are 5 seconds left in the game. The coach signals for a timeout and the team prepares for a field goal. As the field goal team takes the field, someone notices that the kicker is missing.

Perplexed and clearly frustrated, the coach demands to know where the kicker is. In response, an individual steps forward and says that he was recently hired as the team productivity specialist and that he had noticed that the kicker had been “idle” for approximately 97 percent of the game thus far and, to improve the kicker’s utilization, had arranged for the kicker to also sell hot dogs at the concession stand. With the timeout exhausted, the team sets up for the kick without the kicker.

Obviously, this football scenario is ludicrous. No one would have a field goal kicker selling hotdogs in a concession stand. We tolerate the kicker’s “low” utilization because of the value the kicker brings to the game. We don’t know when the kicker will be needed until the moment that he’s needed. And when we need the kicker, we need him immediately. Any delay is intolerable. The silliness of having the kicker multitask is even more ludicrous when we consider that the kicker is often one of the highest scorers on the team.

In light of this silliness, why then in our organizations is low utilization often treated as a great evil to be eradicated at any cost? Why do we share individuals across multiple projects? Why do we sometimes create “busy” work to avoid the perception of idleness?

In keeping someone busy on something other than that which is essential to a team’s success in achieving its goal, we risk the team failing to achieve the goal. If the goal is important enough to warrant the effort needed to achieve it, why would we create an artificial constraint that puts the goal at risk? Having a dedicated kicker on a football team is a business decision. It is a decision made because someone has decided that winning the game is more important than making sure that the kicker has high utilization numbers.

Your Team’s Constraints

Consider your team’s constraints. Do they help or hinder? Keep the helpful ones and work to remove those that get in the way.

A great way to expose constraints is to make sure they are considered and clearly expressed in your team’s charter. A healthy living charter aids ongoing decision making and execution of those decisions. Keep in mind that in a volatile environment, constraints can shift, emerge and disappear. If the constraints change, your charter must adapt to reflect these changes to remain effective. Be sure to keep your charter alive!