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Glossary
What is a capacity line?
A team's honestly available capacity for a period, stated in FTE-months — the constraint that commitments are walked down against, in priority order, until it is spent.
The line is what converts a priority ordering into decisions. An ordering costs nothing — any number of items can be "P1" — but a line forces the next commitment to name what it displaces. Committing past the line is possible; what keeps the line real is that the overrun is made explicit and owned in the room, never absorbed silently.
Related terms
- FTE-month — One full-time person working for one month — a capacity unit that is comparable across teams and, where cost is recorded, is the multiplier a cost forecast would use.
- Allocation vs consumption — Allocation is what people are committed to; consumption is what they spent. Delivery governance measures allocation and deliberately does not measure consumption.
- Capacity planning — Establishing what each team can honestly promise for a period — gross FTE-months minus what is already spoken for — and committing demands against that line in priority order.
This definition comes from building DeliverySheet — it takes a vague work request to a clear delivery decision, so the shape, owner, capacity, dependencies and open questions are on the table before anyone commits people or a date.