Independent programme assurance for PE sponsors and boards, across ERP, AI and integration programmes. An operator's eye on the plans, the estimates and the status reporting, unburdened by delivery incentives.
A major technology programme produces two things at pace. Software, and reassurance. The second is never late. This shows up most often in ERP, because ERP is where the biggest and most established programmes still sit, typically £10M to £50M in total spend. The same problem sits underneath AI programmes and integration programmes too. Different technology, same structure. Someone else writes the status report, and the report is written by the people whose commercial interests it describes.
Status packs are written by the people whose commercial interests they report on. Systems integrators mark their own homework, and they are not lying when they report green. They are reporting against a plan they wrote, using a definition of done they set, in a format designed to demonstrate progress rather than expose risk.
Steering committees see a wall of green until the month the cutover slips. By then the exit clock has been running the whole time.
“The board does not need another delivery partner. It needs someone who can read what the delivery partners are actually saying.”
The engagement is not a review of documents. It is time inside the programme, in the same forums the delivery partner sits in, asking the questions a sponsor would ask if they had thirty years of context to ask them from.
ERP is the largest and most established version of this, and the most common starting point. The same read applies to AI programmes and integration programmes, wherever a delivery partner's reporting is the only view a sponsor has of whether the work is actually happening.
Whether the sequence actually holds. Whether the data migration window allows for the number of dry runs a business this size will genuinely need, or the number the timeline could accommodate. In an AI programme, whether the plan accounts for the unglamorous work of getting data and process ready before anything gets built, or assumes it. Whether testing has been scoped against the integrations that exist or the ones in the original design.
Some plans are padded and some are optimistic, and they fail in opposite directions. Knowing which one is in front of you is the difference between a contingency conversation and a scope conversation.
Customisation creeps in decision by decision, each one locally reasonable. It shows up in the commercials months after it showed up in the build.
The part no integrator can report on honestly, because it is not theirs to fix. Programmes are far more likely to fail on the client side than the technical one, and saying so plainly is part of the job.
What gets said in a working session and what reaches the steering deck are rarely the same thing. Most of the useful signal is in the difference.
What comes back is short, plain and written for the board rather than the programme. On track, off track, or what has to change, with the evidence behind it.
A portfolio company mid-programme, ERP, AI or integration, receiving reporting they have no independent way to verify, on a spend that is material to the investment case.
Someone else scoped it, someone else signed the contract, and the go-live date arrived with the job.
They have been told go-live is on track, and cannot quite articulate why that does not sit right.
Saturn Frontier does not deliver. There is no build to protect, no change request to grow, no phase two to position for. The assessment is not softened by a commercial relationship with the thing being assessed, because there is not one.
That also means the delivery partner is not the adversary here. Most integrators are competent and most programmes go wrong for reasons neither side controls. The value is a second reading from someone who has sat on both sides of the table, not a hunt for someone to blame.
There is no fixed package. A light-touch read on a programme already in flight is a different piece of work to a control tower running from initiation through to hypercare, and pricing them the same would mean overcharging one of them.
Advisory time is charged on a day rate, scoped to the cadence the programme actually needs. The number comes out of a conversation, not a rate card.
Thirty minutes, and you will hear what it is not telling you.