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Glossary

What is an FTE-month?

One full-time person working for one month — a capacity unit that is comparable across teams and converts directly into a cost forecast.

Unlike story points, which are deliberately team-local and have no monetary meaning, FTE-months can be summed across teams and multiplied by a monthly cost. They are coarse on purpose: the granularity broadcasts its own error bar.

Related terms

  • 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.

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.