Note: constraints are identified as hard vs. soft in your project's settings. If you're curious about how your constraints are set up, we recommend getting in touch with your project's admin or reaching out to our support team.

A hard constraint is a constraint that can impact an a work package's ability to move through its workflow.

For example, we require all constraints to be closed out before we move into the Ready for Review status for our IWP.

If we try to move into this status with a hard constraint that's open, we'll receive the following message.

Hard constraints are also included in the % Constraint Free metric.

% Constraint Free essentially means, "How many of my hard constraints have been closed out?"

Alternatively, a soft constraint does not impact a work package's workflow. An example might be a material delay. Maybe this material isn't needed until the end of installation. This means we still have plenty of work to execute on while we wait for the material.

This means if the only open constraint for a work package is a soft constraint, we could move it into the Ready for Review status and avoid the message Oops! message above.

Soft constraints are also not included in a work package's % Constraint Free metric.