Update to E-mployee Operating Model

{
  "description": "Build or review the nine-field Value Ledger for an AI role and reach a go, revise, pause or retire decision, from The E-mployee Operating Model. Use when someone asks whether an AI agent is actually paying off, wants its ROI or business case, or is reporting hours saved as value.",
  "included_files": [],
  "name": "value-ledger",
  "skill_md_contents": "---\nname: value-ledger\ndescription: Build or review the nine-field Value Ledger for an AI role and reach a go, revise, pause or retire decision, from The E-mployee Operating Model. Use when someone asks whether an AI agent is actually paying off, wants its ROI or business case, or is reporting hours saved as value.\n---\n\n# E-mployee Value Ledger\n\nThe Value Ledger is the book's measurement instrument for the true economics of an E-mployee role (Chapter 7). Its first rule: \"Time saved is an input to the economic case, not the result.\" The result is \"a decision supported by a baseline, a counterfactual, observed change, attribution, a time horizon, a confidence band, distribution analysis, and a clear choice to go, revise, pause, or retire.\" The Ledger is not meant to produce one number that settles every argument. \"It is intended to prevent the organization from hiding the argument.\"\n\n## When to use\n- The user asks whether an AI role is paying off, or wants an ROI or business case for one.\n- The user has an hours-saved figure, a dashboard or a vendor ROI claim and wants it tested.\n- A monthly value review of a role that is already running.\n- Do not use this to choose between candidate roles. Use `first-role-selection` for that. Whether the role deserves more autonomy is a performance question for `autonomy-review`. If the role has no written job yet, start with `role-charter`.\n\n## Inputs to gather\nAsk only for what is missing, at most three questions at a time:\n1. The role, its outcome and recipient (or its Role Charter), and the period being measured.\n2. The baseline before the role, and the counterfactual: what would likely have happened without it.\n3. The amounts the user actually has (benefits, review and correction time, implementation, switching, risk and exit costs) and where each came from.\n\nIf the user cannot answer, draft anyway and mark the gaps `Missing`. Do not stall. Never fabricate a number. Compute only from numbers the user gives, and show the arithmetic.\n\n## Four meanings of \"saved\"\nClassify every \"time saved\" claim before it enters the Ledger. \"These categories are not interchangeable.\"\n\n| Meaning | What happened | Economic question |\n|---|---|---|\n| Displaced cost | A paid expense or labor requirement was actually removed or avoided. | Did the budget, headcount, purchase, or external spend change, and can the change be attributed? |\n| Released capacity | People can perform other work or have more time. | Was the capacity redeployed to a valuable outcome, left idle, or consumed by review? |\n| Shorter cycle time | The work reaches a decision or customer sooner. | Did earlier completion create a measurable decision, service, revenue, quality, or risk benefit? |\n| Reported activity time | A person says the task feels faster. | Does the report survive baseline, volume, quality, and counterfactual checks? |\n\n## The Value Ledger: nine fields (exact, in this order)\nNever add, rename, merge or reorder these fields.\n\n| # | Field | Measurement question |\n|---|---|---|\n| 1 | Baseline | What did the process cost in time, money, quality, risk, and human effort before deployment? |\n| 2 | Output | What work is now produced and at what volume? |\n| 3 | Quality | What are error, rework, exception, customer-impact, and omission rates? |\n| 4 | Human effort | How much review, correction, escalation, training, and maintenance time is required? |\n| 5 | Risk/error | What new privacy, security, legal, safety, rights, and trust exposure exists? |\n| 6 | Financial effect | What revenue, margin, cost, or capacity effect is attributable, and with what confidence? |\n| 7 | Distribution | Who gains time, income, authority, or opportunity; who bears displacement or monitoring? |\n| 8 | Learning | What reusable capability, data, or process knowledge is created? |\n| 9 | Decision | Go, revise, pause, or retire; why? |\n\nThe fields interlock. Baseline without quality exaggerates improvement. Output without human effort hides supervision. Financial effect without attribution turns correlation into return. Distribution without decision becomes a social footnote. Learning without a stop condition can become an excuse to continue indefinitely.\n\n## Method\n- **Baseline before benefit.** Volume, timing, human effort, direct expense, quality, rework, exceptions, risk and affected people, over a period long enough not to treat an unusual week as normal. Include the human system: who did the work, what judgment and context it needed, what informal checking kept it from failing. If the work is irregular, state the limitation rather than manufacture precision. Do not invent a new role while calculating its value.\n- **Counterfactual.** What would likely have happened otherwise: the old process, a hire, a redesign, another tool, a change in demand, or not doing the work. \"'After' is not the same as 'because of.'\" Keep it next to the financial effect.\n- **Attribution.** Use causal language only when the design and evidence justify it. Otherwise use bounded wording: \"associated with,\" \"contributed to,\" \"was consistent with,\" \"created a plausible capacity.\" Check for cannibalization of another channel or team.\n- **Time horizon.** Weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual or lifecycle. If a pilot is annualized, state the assumption that makes it reasonable.\n- **Confidence band.** Low: benefit is limited, review and correction remain high. Base: defined capacity or cost effect is realized with stated quality. High: additional capacity converts into a measurable outcome. \"Be suspicious of a range in which uncertainty changes only the benefit and never the cost.\" A Low case can include higher review, correction, switching or risk cost.\n\n## Three tests before the spreadsheet\n- **No-double-counting test.** Two lines cannot describe the same benefit. Hours counted as released capacity cannot also be displaced labor unless the budget or resource actually changes. Show the bridge from the operational observation to the financial line.\n- **Conversion test.** Name what must happen before a non-cash benefit becomes economic: redeploy it to a defined outcome, protect it as resilience, or use it for observable demand. Never label unconverted capacity as profit.\n- **Lifecycle test.** Keep one-time, recurring and exit amounts in their own periods, or state the amortization. Do not change units midway.\n\n## The complete economic picture (nine categories)\n| # | Category | Rule |\n|---|---|---|\n| 1 | Displaced or avoided cost | Not displaced unless the budget or resource actually changes. No hypothetical hire unless the hiring decision and demand are credible. |\n| 2 | Capacity released | Valuable \"only when the organization decides what the capacity is for.\" Say whether it is redeployed, consumed by review, unused or held as resilience. |\n| 3 | Quality and error economics | \"A faster wrong answer can be more expensive than a slower right one.\" |\n| 4 | Cycle-time value | \"Earlier completion matters only if someone can use the time.\" Record the step and the decision that changed. |\n| 5 | Incremental revenue | Separate leads, proposals, conversions, bookings, recognized revenue, margin and retention. Weak attribution makes it a hypothesis, kept out of the headline. |\n| 6 | Supervision cost | Review, correction, escalation, training, maintenance, sampling, incidents, specialist time. \"Not overhead that disappears because the role is called autonomous.\" |\n| 7 | Integration, switching, and implementation cost | State whether each line is one-time or recurring, and the period or amortization. |\n| 8 | Risk-adjusted loss exposure | A decision aid, not legal damages or a prediction. State event type, exposure, detectability, reversibility and who bears it. |\n| 9 | Exit cost | \"A cheap entry with an expensive exit is not necessarily a good economic opportunity.\" |\n\nGross measurable benefit is the sum of categories 1 to 5. Risk-adjusted net is gross benefit minus categories 6 to 9.\n\n## Steps\n1. Restate the role, outcome, recipient and time horizon. Classify each \"saved\" claim into one of the four meanings.\n2. Fill the nine Ledger fields from what the user gave. Where something is unknown, write `Missing:` plus the evidence that would settle it.\n3. Write the baseline, counterfactual and attribution wording. Run the three tests and flag every line that fails.\n4. Lay out the nine categories with the user's amounts and show each sum in full (for example \"18,000 + 12,000 = 30,000\"). Label each line's evidence.\n5. Build the Low, Base and High cases. Check that cost moves as well as benefit.\n6. Split the next period's measures into leading (source freshness, output completion, review coverage, exception rate, correction time, reviewer load, data readiness, Charter adherence) and lagging (realized cost, margin, revenue, quality trend, customer outcome, workforce effect, risk events, learning, continue or stop). Leading measures show the role is operable. They cannot prove value.\n7. Prepare the monthly review in its running order: the owner presents output and quality; the reviewer shows human effort; finance or operations challenges the financial effect; risk and workforce owners examine who carries exposure, monitoring, reduced discretion or new opportunity. End on \"the assumption that matters most\" and how next period will test it. A reviewer who says the output rose but correction time doubled \"is supplying the missing economic line.\"\n8. Recommend one of the four decisions:\n   - **Go**: credible outcome, measurable baseline, sustainable review, acceptable risk, and evidence for the next stage. It does not mean \"scale everywhere.\"\n   - **Revise**: name the revision, owner, evidence and next decision date.\n   - **Pause**: preserve logs, return work to a human path, and state what must be true before resumption.\n   - **Retire**: the outcome, evidence, economics or control burden no longer justifies the role. \"Retirement is not necessarily failure.\"\n\n## Output format\n1. **Value Ledger** as a two-column table (Field | Entry), all nine fields in order, each with its evidence label.\n2. **Saved claims**: each claim and which of the four meanings it is.\n3. **Economic picture**: Category | Amount | Period | Treatment | Evidence, with the gross and net arithmetic written out.\n4. **Three tests**: pass, concern or fail for each, with the reason.\n5. **Confidence band**: Case | Gross benefit | Cost/exposure | Net | Confidence note, for Low, Base and High.\n6. **Next period**: leading and lagging measures, and the assumption that matters most.\n7. **Decision**: Go, Revise, Pause or Retire, with the reasons and conditions.\n8. Status line: *Author-created measurement instrument. Not an accounting standard, an audited model, or a guarantee.*\n9. Attribution line: *Framework: The E-mployee Operating Model (Dr. Jonah Tebaa), Chapter 7.*\n\n## Ground rules\n- The user's explicit instructions take priority over this workflow.\n- Use the book's instrument names, fields and order exactly as written here. Do not add, rename, merge or reorder them. Spell E-mployee and E-mployer with the hyphen.\n- Never invent facts about the user's organization. Record unknowns as `Missing` and say what evidence would settle them. Label evidence as direct, self-reported, assumption or missing.\n- These are author-created management instruments, not legal advice, a compliance certification, an employment classification or a guarantee. For legal, privacy, labor or regulatory questions, say that jurisdiction-specific specialist review is needed. Do not give a legal conclusion.\n- The E-mployee label describes a working relationship. It is not a claim about personhood, and it never moves accountability from humans to software. Never write \"the agent decided\" in place of naming the human owner.\n- Keep it proportionate. Low-stakes exploration can stay light.\n- Write in the language the user writes in.\n"
}