Fractional AI & delivery advisory
A standing retainer across sales, bids and delivery oversight, including the tender work behind three council pursuits.
- Services
- Advisory
- Period
- Mar 2026 – ongoing
- Workstreams
- Sales and bids · Delivery oversight · Strategic advisory · Transition support
The COO left. The work did not.
Ennovative is an Adelaide-based Salesforce partner to Australian local government, with around forty-five staff and several council implementations running at once. Stephen Colman was its COO until March 2026, when he left to run Stratum Labs full time.
What left with him was capacity in three places the founder could not easily replace: bid and tender work, oversight of delivery across concurrent programs, and someone to think with weekly. Hiring a replacement executive was not the answer for a business of that size, and the bids do not wait. One tender response had come back reading as marketing language rather than evidence, with the obvious risk that an experienced procurement panel would recognise it as such.
Four named workstreams, not a vague retainer
The arrangement was made specific before it started. The founder set up four workstreams — sales and business development advisory, client delivery and project oversight, strategic advisory, and transition support — and every hour is booked against one of them. Time is logged, invoiced monthly, and visible to both sides.
That structure is the point. A fractional executive without named workstreams becomes whoever answers the phone. Naming them keeps the arrangement reviewable: the founder can see where the effort actually went and stop paying for the parts that are no longer needed.
What the retainer produces
The work is documents and decisions rather than software. Most of it is bid material, delivery governance and the handover of things that used to sit with the COO.
- Bids
- Review and rewrite of tender and expression-of-interest responses across three council pursuits: general claims replaced with evidence, appendices standardised, team structure set out plainly.
- Pitches
- A pitch guide for a shortlisted pursuit — slide sequence, speaker assignments, two demonstration journeys, presenter notes and timings.
- Change management
- A four-stage change approach for a council Salesforce implementation: impact assessments, change champions, tiered communications and gate-based measures, drawn from an earlier program.
- Delivery oversight
- A weekly session with the project manager on delivery risk, governance and billing, plus a redesign of the support function around triage ownership.
- Transition
- Handover of the remaining COO responsibilities, including moving the forms platform onto the client's own hosting.
Continuity without a hire
The retainer has run continuously since March 2026, across six invoiced months, with no scope disputes on record.
Three council pursuits went out with responses reviewed and rewritten under the retainer. Two are still in train, so no outcome is claimed here.
The change management approach was adopted as the working reference for the client program it was written for, and a change manager hire was approved off the back of it.
The company was represented alongside Salesforce at a local government event in Adelaide in June 2026, with its segment co-designed and delivered under the retainer.
Effort has fallen as the transition finished. The standing weekly meeting moved to an ad hoc rhythm at the end of August, which is what a transition retainer is supposed to do.
Thanks again Stephen for putting the pitch guide together, looking great.
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Strata: Nick Night — Unsplash