The business case needs one rate, not whatever payroll says.

Most businesses now run genuinely blended workforces. Some roles onshore, some offshore, some contracted, some employed directly, doing broadly similar work at very different rates.

When it is time to build the business case for automating a piece of that work, the easy move is to cost it against whatever the current rate happens to be for whoever is doing it today. That number is real. It is also not honest, and it is definitely not stable.

Any one of those arrangements can change. Offshore capacity shifts. Contractor engagements end. A role that looks cheap to automate today because it happens to sit on a lower rate can look completely different once that arrangement moves, and the true comparison quietly reverts to what the business would actually have to pay to get the work done onshore, directly employed.

Build the case entirely against a rate that later disappears, and the case moves with it. Sometimes the saving turns out to be far bigger than anyone realised. Sometimes it turns out there was barely a case at all.

This does two things at once. It protects the business case from evaporating the moment a staffing arrangement changes. And it puts every use case on the Sprint Board on a genuinely level playing field, instead of making the cheapest-staffed task look uninteresting and the most expensively-staffed task look like the easy win, purely because of who happens to be doing it right now.

The Sprint Board carries no numbers of its own. So this discipline is not about winning a formula. It is about making sure that when someone argues for a use case in the room, they are arguing from a number that will still be true next year.