Poppy — you asked for a handful of API automations, and a new front end. Both are worth doing, and this proposal covers them, scoped and ready to start. But while scoping the work, something showed up that's worth putting in front of you first — because it's the thing quietly costing you the most, and it isn't a technology problem.
You asked for automations between the systems ITS already runs — and a refreshed front end. That's a sensible, contained request, and it's the right place to start.
The automation work is charged hourly, billed for the hours actually worked. No retainer, no minimum, no lock-in — the rate sits in the separate commercial summary. You can stop at any point and keep everything built up to that moment. It stands entirely on its own, whether or not you read another word of this document.
But it's worth saying plainly what those automations are: they're connective tissue between systems that were never built to talk to each other. Wix, SELMA, Cloud Assess, HubSpot, Xero, Microsoft 365, and the spreadsheets in between. Each automation is a small bridge across a gap.
Which raises a question worth sitting with for a moment: why are there so many gaps?
Every one of those seven systems holds a piece of the truth about a learner. None of them holds all of it. When a question comes up that lives in the space between them — which system is right, what happens next, has this been done — there's no system that can answer it.
So the question travels to the one place that can answer it. It comes to you.
Every time someone has to ask you something, it's usually because the systems couldn't answer it for them.
It's worth noticing how much of what pulls you back into the day-to-day fits that shape. A partner emails because there's nowhere else to look. A compliance date approaches and only one person knows exactly where the gaps are. An enrolment sits half-finished across three systems and needs someone who knows the order things have to happen in.
None of that is a workload problem you can hire your way out of — which is the uncomfortable part.
Not because they aren't capable. Because the knowledge that joins these systems together isn't written down anywhere — it lives in your head, and the systems are built in a way that requires it.
A new manager can be handed responsibility. They can't be handed the map. So every time they hit one of the seams, the only path forward runs through you — and you get pulled back in, one small question at a time.
Which means the question isn't "who can I trust to run this?" It's "what would have to be true for someone else to actually be able to?"
That's an architecture question. And it has an answer.
Nothing in that right-hand column requires you to care less about ITS, or to step back from it, or to hand over anything you don't want to hand over. It just means the business stops needing you for the things that don't need you — and you get to choose what you stay close to.
Compliance sign-off is a professional judgement call, and it stays that way. The platform can find every gap, format every file exactly as TEC accepts it, and put a finished, checked return in front of a person — but a human who understands NZQA still reviews it and still owns the decision. The same is true of at-risk interventions: the system finds them and drafts the response; a person still decides what's right for that learner and still makes the call. Anyone who tells you AI removes the human from an NZQA-regulated process is selling you something. What this removes is the scramble — not the judgement.
The practical difference is this: today, that judgement has to be yours, because nobody else has the visibility to form one. Afterwards, a capable manager has everything they need to form it themselves — and you're reviewing a decision rather than reconstructing the situation from scratch.
Right now, some of ITS's SaaS logins sit under my personal email. That was expedient to get started, and it isn't right — for either of us. Before anything else is built, every system moves to ITS-owned accounts, on ITS's own domain, with ITS's own API tokens. I get delegated access that you can revoke in one click, any day, without asking me. As a Category 1 PTE holding learner data under the Privacy Act, that's the position you should be in regardless of who you work with.
Before anything else · IncludedThe connective work between the systems you're running today — enrolments, invoicing, and the manual re-keying that eats hours and quietly creates errors. Charged hourly, as you asked. This stands entirely on its own: if you decide to stop here, you're still better off than you were, and you own everything that was built.
What you asked for · Charged hourlyA public site that's fast, that people can actually enrol through in one path instead of four, and that doesn't lose people between a Wix page and a Shopify checkout. This can be done as a standalone piece of work, or bundled — the platform walkthrough shows what it replaces, and the measured reasons the current site is costing you enrolments.
What you asked forOne system, one record, and the portals and compliance engine that let someone other than you run the day-to-day. I'm not asking you to decide this now, and nothing above depends on it. If the automations do their job well and the pattern in section 02 still rings true afterwards — that's the conversation to have. If it doesn't ring true, don't do it, and I'll say so.
Your call · Later · Ongoing subscriptionThe commercial side of this — rates, the subscription, how the two paths compare over a year, and the guarantees that sit alongside them (no lock-in, a clean exit at any time, your data always yours, nothing hidden at the front) — is set out in a separate commercial summary. This document is the thinking; that one is the numbers. Ask and it's yours the same day.
Everything described in this proposal — the single record, the compliance engine, the partner portals, the AI agents, the fast front end — already exists and is running. It was built against ITS's real courses and real compliance requirements, not a generic demo.
The walkthrough has real screenshots taken from a live session — the daily brief naming an actual at-risk learner, the SDR readiness screen, a real course being generated, a real moderation audit being scored. Nothing mocked up, nothing staged. If any of it looks more like marketing than software, say so and I'll show you the working version on a call.
See the platform walkthrough →It's the right question to ask, and you should ask it of anyone in my position. Here's my answer, and you're welcome to hold me to every line of it.
That's the entire point of the exercise. Today the map is in your head. Afterwards it's in a documented system that shows a manager what to do and why — which is the opposite of creating a new dependency, and it's the part that actually makes you replaceable in the day-to-day.
Full export, any time, no conditions, no conversation required. Data portability is never leverage.
Your accounts, your domain, your API tokens — not mine. I'm the one person best placed to quietly make you dependent on me, and this is me refusing to. Judge the offer partly on that.
After twelve consecutive months on subscription, the custom code is yours outright. Want out sooner? An early-transfer option exists — details in the commercial summary. Nobody's trapped, in either direction.
It runs on Cloudflare — mainstream, standard infrastructure, not something exotic only I understand. The code is documented and, per above, becomes yours. Any competent developer can pick it up. That's not a comfortable thing for me to write down, which is rather the point of writing it down.
Not as a consultant looking in. As the person doing the work, inside the sector, for nineteen years — and still doing it now.
Nineteen years inside two New Zealand tertiary institutions, and not the same job the whole time. Started in Accounts Receivable at Massey University (2006–2013) — the finance side. Then twelve years at UCOL: Strategic Development Coordinator, running marketing, web and comms; Senior Advisor for the Development Hub, owning budget, performance and regulatory H&S compliance; International Student Support Coordinator, running the pastoral-care compliance regime under the Education Code of Practice 2016 and the student visa process end-to-end; then Team Leader, Student Engagement — retention and success work focused on at-risk learners, students with disabilities, international students and Youth Guarantee, during the period UCOL recorded the lowest student attrition rate across the Te Pūkenga network. That was a whole-team result rather than any one person's, but the retention work behind it was hands-on, and it was exactly the population this kind of system is built to catch earlier. Back at Massey since June 2025 as Residential Life Manager, running residential operations for 600+ students across 11 halls.
Finance, marketing, compliance, pastoral care, student retention, residential operations. Every function this work touches has been a real job I've held, not an assumption about how a training provider runs. And ShiftScript — a compliance application already live and in production — is proof the build-and-ship part isn't theoretical either.
Poppy — the automations and the front end are worth doing on their own merits, and I'd like to get started on them. Everything else in this document is an observation, not a condition. You're free to take the first and leave the rest, and I'll think no less of the decision.
But if, while the automations are being built, you notice how many of the things that pull you back into the day-to-day are just gaps between systems that couldn't answer for themselves — then we should talk about what it would take for those questions to stop reaching you at all.
[email protected] — Let's scope the first piece