Glossary
What is 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.
Allocation answers the questions a manager is accountable for and stays accurate when watched. Consumption — hours logged, per-person completion rates, velocity — stops being accurate the moment people know it is being read.
What each one can and cannot answer
Allocation answers: can we take this on, what are we already committed to, what happens to the rest if we say yes, and which team is the constraint. Those are the questions a manager is actually accountable for, and every one of them is answerable from figures agreed at commitment time.
Consumption answers: how many hours went where, who closed what, how fast each person moves. None of those is a question anyone needs to run delivery, and collecting them changes the thing being measured — a timesheet is a document about what is safe to write down, not a record of where the time went.
Why the distinction is a design decision, not an omission
Consumption data is easy to collect and reads as rigour, which is why so many delivery tools drift into it. The cost arrives later: once per-person numbers exist, they get compared, and estimates start being written to protect the person rather than to describe the work. The dataset degrades in exactly the place a plan depends on it.
Refusing consumption keeps allocation honest, and honest allocation is what makes a commitment worth anything. It also draws a clean line for the people being planned around: their workload is visible, their week is not.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
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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