FTE and Work Resourcing - second-hand-tigers/badocter-career-learnings GitHub Wiki

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FTE and Work Resourcing

Stress Management & Resilience touches on a simple rule of thumb — mature technologies come with real staffing ratios, something like 0.2 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) per Dynamic Matrix Control (DMC) application. This page expands on why that math matters: a team that's honest about its FTE demand versus its FTE availability can defend a realistic plan. A team that isn't ends up quietly asking people to work evenings and weekends to cover the gap — one of the most direct paths to burnout and regretted attrition.

What FTE Measures

FTE (Full Time Equivalent) is a unit of measure of work capacity used by management to compare team resource available versus projected workload resource demand. This analysis is used in conjunction with work prioritization to determine what work items can be realistically planned in a given time horizon, typically a year.

The same logic applies to an engineering team of any discipline — process, process control, systems, machinery, fixed equipment, instrumentation, analyzers, and so on — and works equally well for non-technical teams.

A Worked Example

Available Resource: 10 FTE. The manager has a team of 10 engineers — 10 FTEs available to progress organizational priorities.

FTE Demand: 12.5 FTE (5 + 1.3 + 2 + 2 + 2.2), listed in order of organizational priority:

Base support — 5 FTE. The engineering team is responsible for supplying base support to 10 major-unit business teams. Past experience puts base support at roughly 0.5 FTE per business team to keep the existing plant maintained and sustain Safety, Health, Environmental, and Margin performance — repair of functional failures is non-discretionary. 10 × 0.5 = 5 FTE.
Regulatory compliance — 1.3 FTE. Each business team has non-discretionary Safety, Health, and Environmental tactical-plan items with hard regulatory compliance deadlines. Screened total load: 1.3 FTE.
Turnaround staffing — 2 FTE. A major turnaround is planned and needs 1 FTE for the next two years to progress plan and design work related to the turnaround scope. Since every year brings a turnaround on at least one major unit, the team can expect to staff two such positions on an ongoing basis: 1 × 2 = 2 FTE.
Capital project — 2 FTE. A two-billion-dollar project to build a new major unit has been approved by senior management, is going to be deployed at site, and will require 2 FTE of engineers.
Margin improvement — 2.2 FTE. Each business team has discretionary Margin Improvement (i.e., profit) tactical-plan items with no hard deadlines. Screened and ordered by Benefit-to-Cost (B-to-C) ratio, total workload is estimated at 2.2 FTE.

In this example the manager has 10 FTE of engineers to do the work, but a workload demand of 12.5.

Resolving the Gap

Line items 1–3 are non-discretionary — all three carry Safety, Health, and Environmental impacts if not done, so they absolutely will be done. Together they total 8.3 FTE, leaving only 1.7 FTE of the 10 available to put toward the improvement work in lines 4–5.
Line item 4, the two-billion-dollar project, doesn't wait its turn. No corporation is going to hold up a major project because of the resource limits of an existing engineering group. The requested 2 FTE puts the total demand of items 1–4 at 10.3 FTE, which exceeds the 10.0 available. The manager will need to pursue approval to increase group headcount or engage third-party resources (an external engineering firm) to close the gap — one or the other will almost certainly be approved, given the high organizational level driving the project.
Line item 5 is the wish list — the business teams' discretionary profit-improvement items. The manager presents this sub-list in B-to-C order to justify further headcount or third-party engagement. The likely outcome: budget approvers authorize additional resources for the highest-value items ("Above-the-Line") and defer or deny the lower-B-to-C asks ("Below-the-Line").

The correct resolution is to have the hard conversations within the management team to balance available FTE resource against FTE demand for the items everyone agrees will be done in the planning cycle. The role of the engineers — particularly the senior engineers — is to provide honest FTE estimates for the work being proposed, and to help get an aligned, prioritized list delivered in terms of work item and FTE load, so it's clear what gets dropped first if other items run long or unplanned non-discretionary work emerges later in the cycle. That list matters because it documents the trigger for going back to management if the above-the-line items can no longer be resourced.

The approach that's doomed to fail is the one that comes back and tells a team of 10 to do the work of a team of 12.5 — asking them to work evenings and weekends for the next two years to get it all done. That's a recipe for regretted attrition (good people quitting) and ending up with a team of 6 that can't even cover the base and regulatory compliance load.

License: © 2026 William Docter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, redistribute, remix, and build upon this material, including for commercial purposes, provided you give appropriate credit to William Docter and indicate if changes were made. The Second-Hand Tigers logo is not covered by this license. All rights in it are reserved.