Who is managing what?
This is an illustrative scenario, not a customer account. The people and the company are invented; every event in it maps to a real mechanism on ftes.ai, named as it happens.
The company is a mid-sized services business with an operations lead and four Digital FTEs: a Finance Controller FTE managed day to day by the finance manager, a Customer Support FTE by the support lead, an SDR FTE by the head of sales, and a Search Visibility FTE by the marketing lead. Each role's routine approvals are routed to its function's manager. The operations lead owns the sort of the work, the order roles were added, the routing, and the monthly review standard, and starts each day in the workforce view rather than in any single workspace.
The roles were added one at a time over several cycles, each under the Second-Role Test.
What does the combined brief say?
One list across four roles, ordered by what blocks the most. At the top: an escalation from the support FTE about a complaint that names a contract term, routed to the lead because the support lead marked it as needing a decision above their level. Then a detection from the finance FTE about a supplier's bank details changing on an invoice, which the finance manager has already escalated as a possible fraud pattern; the lead reads the four-part summary and confirms the finance manager's decision to verify by phone before any payment is proposed. Then a waiting count on the SDR role that is higher than usual. Then the ordinary items, each with the role, the approver, and the age.
Ten minutes, and the lead knows which of the four functions needs attention today and which do not.
What does the waiting count reveal?
The SDR role's waiting count has grown for three days. The lead opens the role's status in the workforce view: approval rate steady, send-backs normal, but items waiting have accumulated for one rep, who is on leave and did not delegate. The fix is routing: the lead assigns a deputy approver for that rep's items for the week, and the count drains by the afternoon. Nothing was wrong with the FTE; an approver was absent, and the workforce view showed it before the pipeline stalled. The lead adds a line to the go-live checklist for future roles: every approver names a deputy.
A growing waiting count is an approver not approving. It is the first pattern the workforce view is built to show.
- Pattern: waiting count rising for one role
- Cause: an approver on leave without a deputy
- Fix: routing, and a checklist line for next time
What does the lead approve personally?
Almost nothing routine. The lead's own items are the escalations marked as above the function manager's level, a remit change the marketing lead proposed to widen the Search Visibility FTE's approved sources, which the lead reads and approves with a note about the quarterly source review, and a plan change: the wallet's usage across four roles over the last cycle says the next block should be one size larger, and the lead, as an admin, changes the plan from the workspace, logged, to apply next cycle. The per-role budgets inside the block are adjusted from each role's usage.
The lead's approval minutes have stayed roughly flat since the second role, because each function's manager approves their own.
How does the monthly review go for one role?
Today is the finance role's review. The lead and the finance manager open its Performance tab: outcomes against targets with evidence, days to close and exceptions on day one against the last two closes, cost per outcome from the role's own usage, approval rate per class with the send-back reasons sorted, and the incident log, which holds the bank-details detection and its resolution. They apply the Promotion Standard to one class the finance manager proposes and decide it is not ready because the send-backs still include rules items; they write the reason in the review note. They do not look at the support role's numbers during this review; each role is judged on its own record.
The review takes half an hour. Four roles, four reviews a month, two hours of the lead's time.
What does the record show at the end of the day?
The audit trail across roles: the escalations with the lead's decisions, the deputy routing for the absent approver, the remit change, the plan change with the lead's name, and the finance review note with its non-promotion and reason. The workforce view at close of day: every role's status, approval rate, and waiting count, the SDR count back to normal. Combined usage against the wallet, which sized the next block. The lead's time on the four roles, logged for the baseline sheet, roughly what it was for two.
The library's piece on managing a hybrid team describes the routing and review practices the day relied on; the glossary entry on the workforce view describes the screen.