Every answer shows its working.

The baseline

You set the people on the team, the capacity the work requires (in full-time equivalents, or FTE), how fast that requirement grows, average salary, and what each unfilled FTE-month costs you in overtime, delay or lost revenue.

Fully loaded cost per person is salary × (1 + benefits load). The default load is 43%, because benefits are 30% of private-industry compensation (BLS, June 2026): 0.30 ÷ 0.70 ≈ 0.43. You can change it.

Each month

• Gap = capacity required − people on the team (never below zero)
• Unmet need = gap − capacity the option adds
• Total cost = labor cost + the option's cost + unmet need × cost of an unfilled FTE-month
• Net result = holding steady's total cost − the option's total cost

What each option adds

• Hire: recruiting cost up front; capacity starts after time-to-fill and ramps up over the ramp-up period; salary is paid from start date.
• Reskill: training cost spread over the training period, with capacity reduced by time away; afterwards, capacity rises by the productivity gain.
• Outsource: transition cost up front; vendor cost plus your oversight cost once live.
• Automate: build cost over implementation, then a monthly run cost; freed capacity ramps up as people adopt the tool.
• Redesign: one-time cost and a temporary disruption during implementation, then an efficiency gain.

The headline figures

• Break-even month: the first month the cumulative net result turns positive after any upfront spend.
• Peak cash exposure: the deepest cumulative shortfall before recovery.
• Annual labor-cost impact: the option's spend in the first 12 months.

Eight foundations are rated from "not in place" to "strong": data quality and access, process documentation, executive sponsorship, AI skills and literacy, governance and human oversight, change capacity, tooling and integration, and funding for reskilling.

For each function you list, capacity freed = people × share of time on repetitive tasks × share of that you judge automatable. It is valued at salary plus benefits. That's capacity to redeploy, not a headcount reduction target.

Weak foundations become roadmap items in the phase where they matter: governance, sponsorship and data in the first 90 days; process, skills and reskilling budget in months 3–9; tooling and change pacing in months 9–18.