Constraint
Anything that keeps a piece of work from being ready to be committed to — a missing decision, material, hand, ruling or predecessor — found in the look-ahead and removed by an owner by a date.
The wide sense of the word is any limit on what can be done. Inside a network of commitments the word is narrower and does work: of everything that should happen, what can? Every no to that question is a constraint. It is not a fault in the person who will do the work; it is a condition the whole Cell is jointly responsible for clearing, because a constraint left standing is a broken commitment waiting to happen.
The log is five columns and lives beside The activity table: constraint · what it blocks · owner · remove-by · status. Removing constraints is first-order work, owned and tracked with the same rigour as any other commitment. When the owner reports one gone, the activity it blocked is constraint-free and may be released to the week. This is why a body running the discipline can move from about half its plans done toward eight or nine in ten within a few seasons: it stops promising work that was never ready.
Two neighbours are often confused with it. A bottleneck is the resource whose capacity paces a whole system — a constraint blocks one activity, a bottleneck paces everything; the older Theory of Constraints uses the word in that second sense. And an Issue is any gap between what is and what ought to be; a constraint is an issue standing between one specific activity and readiness. Constraints a Cell cannot clear travel upward as requests.
Also called: The constraint log · Card 4 · Constraint Analysis And Removal Stands on: The look-ahead · The activity table Opens onto: Make-Ready Process · Commitment · SHOULD-CAN-WILL-DID · Theory Of Constraints · Issue In play: table · Home Sources: Constraint (wiki term page, drafts, unreviewed; the fullest treatment) · The LIØNSBERG Operating System (book, draft v0) §7, Card 4 · The LIØNSBERG Pattern Language — Synthesized (Element 11) · The DNA of Heaven, Part VII — lionsberg.wiki page name: Constraint Open: Two live senses of the one word — the make-ready sense kept here, and the Theory of Constraints sense, which the drafts hand to bottleneck.