Pricing One Constraint
The two-hour method for working out what a single constraint costs, why a rebuilt fortnight beats a model, and the six numbers to compare.
One constraint priced by rebuilding a single fortnight without it
Relaxing one constraint cost eight supervisor hours a fortnight and bought back five unfilled shifts, fifteen overtime hours and a visibly fairer weekend distribution. One fortnight, rebuilt twice, by one person in an afternoon. This is one employer's own test, not a benchmark.
Pricing a constraint means rebuilding a real fortnight without it and comparing the two versions. That is the whole method. It takes an afternoon, it needs no model and no data project, and the result is specific enough that people argue about the right things.
The constraint in “Pricing One Constraint” becomes useful only when its source, cost and effect on coverage are visible. A team considering check the documented workflow here for monitask pricing can add timely work and attendance context, with transparent settings, limited access and a clear correction route.
Everything else — averages, benchmarks, estimates of what a rule "probably" costs — produces numbers nobody believes, including the person who produced them.
The assumptions behind “Pricing One Constraint” can also be checked against CIPD working-hours factsheet. Record what applies locally and what requires qualified advice.
Choosing the fortnight
Not the quietest and not the most catastrophic. Pick one that was difficult in a normal way: a bit of sickness, a vacancy, the usual leave.
Picking the worst fortnight of the year overstates the case and will be dismissed on exactly that ground. Picking a quiet one understates it and wastes the exercise.
Rebuilding it honestly
Build the alternative version properly, with the same people, the same leave, the same absences, and every other constraint still in place. Only the one being tested is removed.
The temptation is to relax a second thing while you are there. Resist it: a rebuild with two changes proves nothing about either.
The six numbers
- Shifts that could not be filled.
- Overtime or agency hours required.
- Individuals working more than the pattern intends.
- Distribution of unsocial shifts across the team.
- Any resource the alternative needs more of.
- Time taken to build the rota.
The fifth is what makes it a trade rather than a saving, and a price with no fifth column will not be believed.
The sixth number, which nobody expects
Build time matters more than it looks. A constraint that adds forty minutes to every fortnightly build is costing seventeen hours a year of somebody's attention, and that somebody is usually the person with the most to do.
It is also the number most likely to persuade the person doing the work to keep going with the exercise.
Who should do the rebuild
The person who builds the rota, with somebody else watching. The watching matters: a rebuild done alone tends to reproduce habits invisibly, and a second pair of eyes catches the places where the old constraint is still being honoured out of reflex.
Two hours, two people, one fortnight. That is the whole resource requirement.
Checking the result is real
Three questions before the number is quoted anywhere. Would the alternative version have been publishable? Does it breach anything else? Would the people in it have accepted it?
The third is worth asking out loud. A rebuilt fortnight that nobody would have agreed to is an arithmetic exercise rather than a price.
Presenting it
One page, six rows, before and after, with the resource the alternative needs stated first rather than buried. Then one sentence saying what the constraint costs per fortnight and what removing it would require.
Any longer and it becomes a report, which will be scheduled for discussion and then not discussed.
Pricing the ones that turn out to be free
Some constraints cost nothing: the rebuild looks identical. That is a genuine result and it should be recorded, because it closes the question.
"Tested, no measurable effect, March" is one of the most useful lines a register can contain. It stops the same constraint being blamed for the rota's difficulties every year by somebody new.
When to repeat it
When the team size changes materially, when the service changes, or every two years. Constraint prices move with the shape of the team, and a price from four years ago is a historical note.
Repeating it is quick, because the method is now known and the fortnight is just another fortnight.
What to do when the rebuild is impossible
Sometimes the constraint cannot be removed even on paper, because the pattern collapses without it and the rebuild has nowhere to go.
That is itself the price: the constraint is load-bearing, and the register should say so with the date it was tested. Load-bearing is a much more useful description than binding, because it is a statement about this pattern rather than about the world, and it will change when the pattern does.
The habit this builds
After three or four of these, people stop arguing about whether a constraint is expensive and start asking what it was measured at. That shift in the conversation is worth more than any individual number.
It also makes the next constraint easier to examine, because the exercise is now something the team does rather than something being done to them.