Clarity PPM - Full-time equivalent (FTE) Allocation Calculation

Products

Clarity PPM On Premise Clarity PPM SaaS

Issue/Introduction

How is full-time equivalent (FTE) allocation calculated?

Resolution

Full Time Equivalent (FTE) refers to the unit of measurement equivalent to the daily availability rate (in hours) of a company standard work day, applicable in a variety of contexts.

According to the Clarity glossary definition, full-time equivalent (FTE) is a method for normalizing data for full and part-time resources and is calculated based on the standard calendar. The standard calendar is the calendar that has the Standard check box checked under Administration - Base Calendars - Edit Calendar Properties tab.

Using FTE for data entry will take the incoming FTE number and convert it to hours using the Standard Calendar.
Using Days for data entry will take the incoming number and convert it to hours using the Standard Calendar.
Using Hours for data entry will directly save the specified hours (stored as seconds in the database).
Using % Availability, will take the incoming number and convert it to hours using the Resource's Calendar when entering data into a record tied directly to a specific resource in Assignments and Staffing.
Switching the view from Hours to FTE or Days will use the Standard Calendar for conversion at all levels.
Switching the view from Hours to % Availability will use the Resource's Calendar for conversion for Resource-specific records as in the case of Assignments ETCs and Staffing Allocations.
For Tasks and Investments, the work effort amounts are converted to % Availability using the Standard Calendar because the multiple resources may have different calendar exceptions and the calculation can only use 1 availability rate. Clarity computes the total number of hours and uses the Standard Calendar to convert it up thru the Task WBS and up to the Investment.
Rollup to Investments or Task Phases and Summary levels could produce a number that is not a simple 'sum' of the % Availability because it uses the date range of that level to determine the overall % Availability.
Using the 'Group By' on a grid will produce a 'Sum' of the converted values for the rows included in the results.

FTE allocation value is the hours available for a resource to work on a project based on the resource calendar divided by available hours based on the Standard Calendar. Here are some samples of FTE calculation.

Scenario 1: A resource is 50% allocated to a project, working 20 days for November with 7 hours/day as resource calendar specifics. In the standard calendar, there are 20 working days and 8 hours per day system wide. The allocation FTE will be 0.48 which is 70 hours (50% * 7 hours/day * 20 days) divided by 160 hours(8 hours/day* 20 days)
Scenario 2: Given the same configurations in Scenario 1, if this resource has a 1 week leave, this 1 week (5 days) is marked as non-work day in the resource calendar. In this scenario the resource will work on the project for 52.5 hours (50% * 7 hours/day * 15 days) in November, the FTE will be become 0.33 which is 52.5 hours divided by 160 hours.
Scenario 3: Given the same configurations in Scenario 1, if the Standard Calendar has 1 week marked as non-working days but resource still working during that week, the available hours in Standard Calendar would become 120 hours. FTE allocation will be 0.58 which is 70 hours divided by 120 days.
NOTE: If a resource's daily availability rate is greater than the Standard Calendar and the shifts extend beyond the standard Investment daily boundaries of 08:00 am - 05:00 pm, the resource can be allocated at 100% but the resulting number of hours may be slightly less as it will fit the amount into the date/time boundaries of the Project Start Date at 08:00 am and the Project Finish Date of 05:00 pm.

An example using % Availability where a resource may have a different availability rate than the Standard Calendar can yield different results when looking at the rollup for Tasks and Investments

Example: Resource Availability Rate is different than the Standard Calendar rate
- When the Resource's daily availability rate is different than the standard rate, there is an impact for rolling up the individual resource data up through the Task WBS or the Investment level which uses the Standard Calendar at these levels. It has to use one Calendar to roll up Resources that may have different shifts and non-working day exceptions.
- A resource has a personal calendar with shifts set for 8 hours a day. The Standard calendar has shifts set for 7 hours a day.
- This resource is assigned to a Task with a duration of 1 week (Mon-Fri) which sets the ETC to 40 hours.
- Looking at the Task and the Assignment ETC values match for 40 hours.
- Switching the view to display % Availability will now cause the percentage to not match between the Assignment ETC and the Task total ETC.
- The Assignment ETC will show 100 as expected because it is using the Resource calendar of 8 hours per day, computed as ETC/'Resource' Availability (40/40 = 100.00%).
- The Task ETC is showing approximately 114.29 because it is using the Standard calendar of 7 hours per day, computed as ETC/'Standard' Availability (40/35 = 114.29%).
- The Allocations will show 100 as expected because it is using the Resource calendar of 8 hours per day.
- The Total Allocations and ETCs will total up the hourly values for all resources and use the Standard calendar to convert to FTE or % Availability.

Additional Information

A future release will allow using % Availability Unit of Measurement through Modern UX. In 16.0.3 and earlier releases, this is only available through Classic