Microsoft® Solutions Framework Essentials

Optimizing Constraints

Environmental challenges can be overwhelming. When presented collectively, these challenges can paralyze a team—as proved by the large number of projects that fail (e.g., the Standish Group reported that in the year 2003, only 34 percent of 30,000 application development projects succeeded, while 15 percent failed and 51 percent were challenged).^[1] A team should distill these challenges into constraints that can be addressed by the solution delivery process as well as project governance. Although MSF does not provide a prescriptive means of identifying constraints, a few good published methods do (e.g., Theory of Constraints).^[2],^[3] Constraints need to be thoughtfully balanced throughout a project so that as impacting ...