Glossary
What is KTLO (keep the lights on) work?
KTLO (keep the lights on) is the work a team must do to keep what already exists running — support, on-call, patches, upgrades, renewals and routine operations — as distinct from work that changes what exists.
KTLO is capacity already spent before any request is discussed. It is predictable in total and unpredictable in detail, which is why it belongs in a capacity plan as a standing line per team, not as individual commitments. It is not the same as unplanned work: an on-call rotation is planned KTLO, while the incident that pulls two more people in is unplanned. Left out of the plan, KTLO does not disappear; it is taken from whatever was promised.
KTLO vs unplanned work vs tech debt
The three are often put in one bucket and should not be. KTLO is known in advance: the support rotation, the certificate renewals, the quarterly dependency upgrades, the access requests. Unplanned work is what arrives during the quarter without warning: incidents, escalations, an urgent ask from another team. Tech debt is a choice about the future: work that would make later changes cheaper, which can be scheduled, ranked and declined like any other request.
The distinction matters because each is handled differently. KTLO is subtracted from capacity before planning starts. Unplanned work gets a reserve sized from the team's own history. Tech debt goes through the same decision as a feature, with a stated reason and a size.
How much engineering capacity goes to KTLO
There is no figure worth copying from another company. The share depends on the age of the systems, how many customers they serve and how much is automated. A young product team may spend a tenth of its time keeping things running; a team that owns an old billing platform may spend more than half.
Measure your own instead. For one quarter, list what each team did that changed nothing for a customer but had to be done: rotations, upgrades, renewals, routine requests. Size each coarsely in FTE-months and add them up per team. That is the team's KTLO line, and it is the first number to take out of gross capacity. Re-measure once a year, or when a system is retired.
How to show KTLO in a capacity plan
Give it its own line per team, in the same unit as everything else, above the line where commitments start: gross capacity, minus KTLO and booked leave, minus the reserve for unplanned work, leaves what the team can promise. A plan that starts from headcount and skips this subtraction is over-committed on the day it is written.
Do not turn KTLO into tickets to be approved one by one, and do not hide it inside project estimates as padding. As a visible line it can be questioned once, defended once and reduced deliberately, for example by retiring a system or automating a rotation. A falling KTLO line is one of the few honest ways a team gains capacity without hiring.
Related terms
- FTE-month
An FTE-month is 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
Capacity planning establishes what each team can honestly promise for a period — gross FTE-months minus what is already spoken for — and commits 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.
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