An independent, principal-level governance function between your executive sponsor and your system integrator — answering only to the executive team and the board. I stand up and run program governance, hold the SI accountable to the SOW, and protect the value thesis with PMO-grade rigor and the standing of someone who has delivered these programs, not just administered them.
The Problem
Enterprise programs rarely fail because of technology. They fail because of structure.
Your system integrator’s incentive is the SOW — expand it, staff it, renew it
Your internal team’s incentive is survival — minimize change, keep operations running
Your incentive as sponsor is the value thesis — time to value, working capital, EBITDA
Three rational incentives pointing in three directions — and the two-party model has no mechanism to resolve it
The Engagement
Every major program has two seats at the table: the sponsor who owns the outcome and the integrator who owns the delivery. Both are conflicted — one by optimism, one by billing. The Sovereign Third™ is the independent third seat: a principal-level operator who reports to you, holds PMO authority, and operates with structural independence from both the integrator and internal IT.
Governance stood up and operated, not documented: Stage gates, decision logs, risk and dependency registers, budget-to-value tracking
Integrator and vendor accountability: Scope, sequencing, staffing, and performance challenged against the SOW, with go/no-go arbitration at every gate
Translation: Configuration decisions expressed as business impact — time to value, working capital, EBITDA
Data migration discipline and decision forcing: The two places programs quietly die
BAS™-instrumented value tracking: Governance argued from task-level cost and capacity data, not status-report color codes
Cadence is executive: weekly with program leadership, monthly with the sponsor and CFO, quarterly with the board. Four insertion points: before SOW signature (highest leverage), Day 1, the first yellow dashboard, or a compressed-timeline integration. Governance informed by having sat in every seat — six interim technology-executive seats and 100+ enterprise systems engagements on the delivery side of the table.
Proof
Cybersecurity carve-out from a global technology company (TMO co-manager via Deloitte): 20+ workstreams, 5 new entities, 100+ applications separated on schedule under acute TSA exit deadlines; risk mitigations saved the PE client millions in additional fees
$250M Guidewire program, public specialty insurer (Interim IT Director): Stalled 12 months with no code delivered; reorganized the 25-person team and re-engineered Agile delivery — code in QA within 2 months, continuous UAT delivery by month 3, permanent leader recruited in 6
National pipe distributor (250K SKUs, 18 DCs): Third consulting firm on the second ERP attempt; realigned team and sponsor, redesigned master data, and architected the planning framework that made the platform work — ~99% of manual planning and purchasing execution eliminated
The Sovereign Third™
The independent operator between your executive sponsor and your system integrator.
