Glossary
What is resource allocation?
Assigning a share of specific people's or teams' capacity to specific work for a defined period — the decision about who gets the capacity, as distinct from the calculation of how much capacity exists.
An allocation is a plan, stated before the work: half of this person, or two FTE-months of this team, for this quarter. It is not a record of where time went. Keeping it coarse and forward-looking is what keeps it true; once an allocation is reconciled against logged hours it has turned into time tracking, and people start reporting what is safe to write down.
Resource allocation vs capacity planning, levelling and time tracking
Capacity planning establishes supply: what each team can honestly promise in a period once support, leave and interruptions are taken out. Resource allocation distributes that supply: which work gets which share. The order matters — allocating before the line is drawn is how a team ends up promised at 140 per cent of a number nobody calculated.
Resource levelling is a scheduling technique that comes afterwards: where people are over-allocated in a given period, start and finish dates are moved until the demand on each person fits what they have, usually at the cost of a later end date. Time tracking is different in kind. Allocation is the planned share; tracking is the hours consumed. One is agreed in advance and can be planned against; the other is collected afterwards and answers a billing question.
How to allocate: fractions of a person, per quarter
Allocate at the grain the plan can actually hold. Three months out, nobody knows which afternoon a person will spend on what, but a team does know that a migration needs about half of two engineers for the quarter. So state allocations as fractions of a person over a period — half an engineer for three months is 1.5 FTE-months — and sum them per team against that team's capacity line.
Keep the fractions few. A person split 20 per cent across five pieces of work is allocated to none of them: the switching cost eats the share, and each of the five plans assumes a day a week that does not arrive. Where possible, allocate to teams and not to named individuals: the team's total is what was promised, and who does which part stays the team's business.
Over-allocation
Over-allocation is the sum of a person's or team's shares exceeding what they have. It is rarely one decision. It accumulates through separate yeses, each reasonable, each made without the running total in view — which is why the total has to be visible at the moment of the next yes, not in a report afterwards.
There are three honest responses: move a date, reduce a scope, or take something out and say so. The dishonest one is to leave the plan at 130 per cent and let the people in it decide privately what to drop. That choice still gets made; it is just made by the person with the least context, and nobody is told.
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.
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