FTE Overview

Introduction

FTE stands for "Full-Time Equivalent."

It is a way to measure an employee's involvement in a project or job compared to a full-time position in an organization's defined work schedule.

For example, if your business considers 40 hours to be a full-time workweek, then an employee working 40 hours per week would be represented as an FTE of 1.0. It is often used in workforce planning / budgeting, and to standardize the measurement of work across various roles and sectors within an organization.

In AdaptiveWork, FTE lets you plan and communicate resource demand in workforce terms rather than raw hours. Instead of asking "how many hours does this project need?", you can ask "how many people, working full time, does this require?" — the language that resource managers, finance teams, and executives use when making staffing decisions or assigning resources.

What is FTE in AdaptiveWork?

FTE is a resourcing unit used in the context of Resource & Capacity Management capabilities within AdaptiveWork, alongside 3 other resourcing units:

• Hours
• Units:
  • Capacity unit % is calculating the resource capacity hours compared to default org hours in a day (weekly or monthly capacity unit % are the average of daily units)
  • Assignment unit % is calculating assignment hours compared to daily/weekly/monthly resource capacity

• Person Days: Capacity and Assignment are measured in comparison to default org hours in a day

Setting the Work Item Effort

• Defining overall Work

The overall required effort of a work item is typically set in Minutes, Hours, Days or Months (using the Work column).

If not defined otherwise, AdaptiveWork distributes the amount of hours equally over the work item duration (periodic task assignments).

• Defining Work per Period

The work item effort (work) can be specified per period (days, weeks, month) in the various resource planning views.

In these views, users have the option to:

1. convert defined periodic assignments from hours to any of the other resourcing units (FTE, units, person days)
2. define periodic assignments directly in any of the available resourcing units (hours, units, person days, FTE)

Which views support which resourcing units?

Setting periodic assignments in FTE or converting defined periodic assignments to FTE is available in the views as displayed in the table below.

^{* will be addressed in a future release}

Changes on Task-level assignments 

Regardless of the FTE Project Assignment field setting, the moment work moves into execution, every task-level assignment is managed in Hours, Units% or Person Days. That's by design: FTE models workforce demand for planning, while Hours measure task execution and delivery progress.