Planning allowance: 2–4 working days. Select one workflow and write down who receives the result, what action follows and what constitutes an unacceptable error. Exclude new features that are not necessary to test the decision.
For extraction, define field names, treatment of missing or illegible values, currency/date conventions and business rules. For support, distinguish drafting from taking an action; specify permissible actions and required escalation. Assign a cost or operational consequence to each important error without pretending every harm can be priced.
Collect a representative billing period and compute current accepted output. Separate an API request from a task: a task may involve several calls or retries. The proposed economic rule is “meet all critical requirements and improve the chosen whole-life measure under the approved downside case”, not simply “reduce tokens”.
Exit artefacts: task contract, metric dictionary, current monthly cost ledger, named decision owner and explicit no-build outcome.