Glossary · FDE Level Standard

Term	Definition
Scope of responsibility	The judgement basis for a level, combining responsibility object, cost of failure and replaceability. Not technical depth.
Mark	One of five: Guided, Independent, Adaptive, Systemic, Industry. Each domain occupies exactly one mark per level.
Step-up	The concrete change from the previous level, written at the top of each level table. It must be an action, never an adjective.
Scenario	A bounded, measurable, acceptable business action — not a system and not a department.
Evidence pack	Six kinds of submitted material: business diagnosis, scenario and acceptance, data and permissions, AI debugging and evaluation, delivery operations, assetisation.
Asset	A connector, template or evaluation set. The test is that a second delivery actually used it.
Two tracks	Technical delivery and business delivery. Same ladder, same pay band width, different capability weighting.
Fast-track	Skipping the normal promotion path, subject to unanimous review and verifiable external evidence.
Metric language	What the level reports value in: task effort → scenario metrics → portfolio value → business language → industry impact.
Five marks (quick reference)	Guided (Completes the work with a template or instructions; no judgement required); Independent (Completes the standard case without guidance); Adaptive (Handles exceptions and non-standard cases, and makes trade-offs); Systemic (Turns practice into a mechanism or standard others follow); Industry (Influences outside: adopted by peers, or shapes a standard)