A condition or event that prevents the project from fully delivering the ideal solution to customers and end-users.

Customers and end-users will request an ideal version of a solution from the project team. This ideal solution can only be achievable under ideal conditions where the organization and project are completely free of all constraints.

In reality, every organization faces conditions that prevent them from achieving the absolute ideal solution. It is part of the analyst’s job to identify these constraints and ensure that customers and end-users understand how these constraints are preventing the project team from achieving the absolute ideal solution. This is part of the expectation-setting that business analysts have to perform on an ongoing basis to keep customer and end-user expectations realistic throughout the project.

Constraints should be documented as part of scope and business requirements that the business analyst produces for their project. Customer requests should have the feasibility of their requests assessed against this list of constraints when determining product scope.

As a business analyst, you will have to make sure you identify both the business constraints and the technical constraints that are going to prevent your project team from delivering on the customer requests.