I was watching the DVD of Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer with my daughter last night. I was amused to note that the constraint in the elf toy factory is the paint shop operated by an elf called Herbie - remember the walk in the hills example from The Goal where the slowest boy is also Herbie. How do we know Herbie is the constraint? Because the foreman sees the inventory building up in front of him. Why is Herbie the constraint? Because he is not motivated in his job and his throughput is reduced through lack of proper motivation. Herbie wants to give up being the factory constraint and become a dentist instead. As I've pointed out before, dentists really understand how to be the constraint and how to manage around it.

I see a parable in the life of Herbie and the elf toy factory. I'm not the first person to observe that software engineers need to be properly motivated to be productive and I have often talked of the role of leadership and management in creating a properly motivating environment and jobs for software engineers. However, I may have been the first person to point out that lack of motivation can cause developers to become the system constraint. I spend a lot of effort in the book making this clear. The techniques in "Agile Management..." help a manager to identify the constraint. In the case of a lack of motivation, I delegate to others, the problem of elevating the constraint. There has been mush written by the likes of Jerry Weinberg, Tom De Marco, Tim Lister, and Larry Constantine on how to motivate software engineers. I didn't need to repeat their advice.

In the movie, the foreman elf "motivates" Herbie by telling him that he should shut up and put up, and that his life is that of a toy factory elf - forget becoming a dentist. The result is that Herbie drops out and becomes a "misfit". I'm sad to reflect that I have seen many similar attempts at motivation over this last 2 years during the recession in IT. All too often, management will tell developers that they are "lucky to have a job" and to "stop asking for help" and to "just get busy coding".

My prediction then for 2004 is that as the economy improves (even if this is temporary) it will unleash a backlog of pent up frustration and we will see excessive staff churn as geeks move on in search of a better boss, a better, more motivating environment and new challenge.

[Updated 12/28/03 1330 PST]