How to adjust FTE by myself instead of default by Rally itself

[Larry Zhang]

<nobr>The following formula is used by the company to evaluate each team's productivity and as a matter of fact, my team's productivity is below the average. 

Throughput(Stories)Normalized=(Accepted−Rejected)/FTE</nobr> <nobr>=43/9.90</nobr><nobr>=4.34

When I analyze this formula, I have discovered the FTE is a factor that questionable. Say, one month I have 7 team members working full time, then FTE is 7. Another month,
4 people are taking 50% days as vacation, the FTE should be 5, but Rally still uses 7 to calculate my normalized Throughput. So obviously this is incorrect.

So the question is how can I adjust this FTE for each person based on its real working capactiy, instead of using Rally's default FTE ( as Rally default using 1 instead of considering people my not working full time).</nobr>

[Larry Zhang]

Why there is no any replies on this issue? I wanted to adjust the FTE as it should be changing based on the team members availability, correct?

[Christopher Pola]

Hello @Larry Zhang,

Is this question related to the Productivity formula and FTE calculation in Rally Insights?
If so, I will share a little more information on how FTE is actually calculated based on the SDPI framework.

Cheers,
Christopher

[Larry Zhang]

yes, I want to know how to change the FTE by myself? Say for example, I am taking 5 days vacation in one sprint, my FTE should be 0.5 not 1, how to do it?

[Christopher Pola]

Hello @Larry Zhang,

I am finally getting around to post a detailed response to this question. I decided to break the response into two parts: first I will define the different concepts​ of tracking Hours/Velocity in Rally plus the purpose of Insights as these seem to be overlapping, and second to deconstruct the FTE calculation in Insights by borrowing from the explanation posted by @Eric Nash in a different thread, because he explained the FTE calculation very well.

First the different concepts:

• Hours: Teams and individuals can track hours in places like the Track > Team Status page or on Apps like Team Capacity Grid. This is useful if the team are breaking the work down into Tasks and estimating the number of hours to complete a task. The individual or collective team capacity then is the time in hours they have.
• Velocity: this is a way to measure a teams capacity by using Story Points or some other relative estimation technique and against the Planned Estimate (Story Points).  
• FTE: this metric in Insights is not calculated or derived from either Velocity or an individual's capacity/hours. It is a read only field in Insights which I will explain in more detail below.

Applying these concepts to your original question:
If an individual is working on more than one team, or if they are on vacation and their time needs to be adjusted: then you reflect that in the Team Capacity/Team Status page if you are using Tasks, and you plan to capacity that way, or if the team is using Velocity/Story Points, adjust the Velocity as it relates to the Iteration Timebox (Plan > Timeboxes). You make the adjustments to the available hours/velocity in those areas of that application and you use that information to plan appropriately.

Onto the topic of Insights and FTE:
In simple terms Insights is a separate analytics engine built off the Software Development Performance Index framework. It provides benchmark data by normalizing and anatomizing data on the Rally platform. Therefore they created ways to make calculations like FTE that could be applied to the dataset in a manner that was agnostic or applicable to any team data regardless of agile maturity (i.e. permanent team members) or methodology (i.e. Scrum, Kanban, XP etc.). 

FTE as explained by@Eric NashFTE calculations are based on the distribution of transactions which per the Insights Help: is determined through a heuristic which evaluates user actions in Rally across teams/projects for users who contributed to the project being analyzed. 

In essence, all of the transactions that a user/person does in a given Team/Project in Rally (in a given Workspace) is equates to 1.00 FTE for that period. For example: A user is working on two teams/projects, and their time is split between the two projects (Team A, Team B). In a given month that user made 184 total transactions (create, updates etc.) during the month of April 2016; 126 updates to work items in Team A, and 58 transactions to work items in Team B's backlog.

When you scope Insights to Team/Project B then the calculation for how many FTEs that user/person represents in the project would be something like 58/184 = .31 FTE. Total FTE is simply the sum of this calculation for every user who contributed work to the project. The heuristic for determining the number of transactions per user is opaque but the reason why the SDPI framework uses this type of calculation to determine FTEs is fundamental sound as it's just trying to give an indication of what the productivity level was for the team, and an actual count of the number of people working in that team/project at that time.

Summary:
It is not possible to change the inputs into SDPI/Insights. The framework uses calculations that make the benchmark data relevant regardless of the type of team or methodology. If you need to reflect a team members vacation time or the fact they work on multiple teams then I recommend using the pages/apps above depending how the team plans/estimates. 

I know for some this might be TL;DR. Yet, hopefully helpful.
This is a link to the other post by Eric​ here.

Let me know if this was helpful or do not hesitate to ask if anything is unclear or needs further verification.

Cheers,
Chris​​