Theory of Constraints and Agile Project Management

Recently on the LinkedIn forum PM Toolbox, Arash Sadati asked for comments about tool support for how Goldratt's Theory of Constraints (TOC) or Critical Chain Project Management can be integrated as part of the Agile Project Management. Here are my thoughts on the subject.

One thing all agile projects share is that - because of a conscious removal of dependencies between features wherever possible - they will be resource constrained rather than critical path constrained (a generalisation but broadly valid). Methods like Scrum-XP try to avoid specific role constraints (e.g. we can't make progress because we don't have a BA or a GUI expert or a middleware expert available) by specifying only 3 role types (Product Owner, Scrum Master, Team Member). So the team as a whole must to some extent be generalists (or at least prepared to learn / fill in specific roles) to reduce the risk of role constraints. In any real application of Scrum of course such role constraints may be real and teams will have to pay attention to them. The default condition though is worth understanding because it's a means to keep the effect of role constraints to a minimum.

FDD defines many more roles and I think as a result there is a greater risk of role constraints. Availability of specific class owners for example is a typical problem which Palmer and Felsing discuss in their book on FDD. Flexibility, especially in small teams, for people to wear multiple role "hats" is crucial. The really interesting observation in comparing agile to waterfall is the requirements process where detailed specification of features is ideally "just in time". David Anderson and others point out that it is a serious waste of precious resources to allow too much work to be done on future requirements when the critical constraint is the development team.

When we were specifying the xProcess product which is designed to support any priority-driven process (any agile process in other words), we did want to be able to give visibility to problems arising from role or resource constraints. Patterns of tasks can be defined in custom processes that require specific or general roles - or even allocation to specific team members - so that forecasting can take into account not only the total development effort available, but in the cases where specialised roles are required. It can therefore show the impact of limited availability of critical roles. Custom reports can be generated to show resource utilisation, and where these show less than 100% utilisation, the situation is likely to be one where specific roles are "critical", requiring other roles to wait for them.