We are migrating our website from WordPress to a modern Django / Wagtail / Saleor stack. The work spans architecture, functionality, and content, currently delivered by an India-based development team, a Manila development team, and a content team. As the programme scales, it now needs dedicated project-management ownership to hold one plan, sequence the work correctly, and drive it to an on-time, on-budget launch.
Role purpose
- Own the delivery plan end to end and drive the replatform to a defined, on-time, on-budget go-live.
- Sequence and protect the critical path. These are not three parallel lanes — architecture decisions gate functionality (Wagtail models, Saleor schema, templates), and functionality gates content migration and authoring. Managing that dependency chain is the core of the job.
- Provide the single coordination and reporting point across the delivery teams and internal stakeholders.
- On successful delivery, potential to become permanent and extend into the follow-on community-platform project.
Success measures — definition of done
- Replatform delivered on time and on budget, to the agreed scope and quality bar.
- A testable go-live achieved: content migrated off WordPress, redirects in place, commerce/tax correct, cutover executed with rollback cover.
- Any extension is earned by new scope (e.g. the community platform), not by slippage on the core replatform.
Early priorities (first weeks)
- One agreed roadmap with the critical path and a clear definition of done.
- Jira set up as the single source of truth — issue types, workflows, boards, and dependency links — with risks, issues, and dependencies tracked in the tool rather than in detached side-documents.
- RAID and RACI stood up — a governance-level overview in Confluence, plus RACI applied on the actual epics and stories in Jira (owners, reviewers/approvers, consulted, informed).
- An initial capacity plan across the India, Manila, and content teams.
- A regular status and escalation rhythm (steering update + working-level cadence).
- The four high-risk items below explicitly owned and tracked.
Key responsibilities
- Own the roadmap, milestones, and critical path; sequence architecture → functionality → content and manage the handoffs, including India / Philippines time-zone handoffs.
- Act as the single PM interface between the India-based dev team, the Manila team, and internal stakeholders (Chris, David, Joma).
- Run consolidated governance and reporting — steering-committee updates, status, and risk/issue escalation — as one reporting line, not several.
- Run delivery in Jira as the single source of truth — well-structured boards, workflows, and dependency links; risks, issues, and dependencies tracked in-tool rather than in detached side-documents.
- Operationalize RACI at the work-item level — set owners, reviewers/approvers, consulted parties, and watchers on the relevant epics, stories, and tasks so the right people are pulled in at the right moment; keep the governance-level RAID/RACI overview current in Confluence.
- Capacity planning — forecast and balance workload across the India, Manila, and content teams; track throughput; flag over-allocation and re-plan early.
- Backlog & ticket quality — break work into well-scoped tickets with clear descriptions, acceptance criteria, and a shared definition of ready/done. This matters most for asynchronous, cross-time-zone offshore delivery, where an ambiguous ticket costs a full day.
- Explicitly track the replatform's highest-risk, cross-cutting items — the ones that sit outside the three neat buckets and most often derail launches:
- Data & content migration out of WordPress (users, content, URLs) — technical and high-risk; distinct from content authoring.
- SEO / redirects / URL preservation — 301s and URL structure to protect existing organic traffic.
- Launch / cutover — DNS switch, Cloudflare / auth flip, parallel run, and a rollback plan. The single riskiest moment of the project.
- Commerce & tax correctness — multi-entity Saleor + Stripe, invoice numbering, OSS/VAT. Compliance-grade: bugs mean wrong invoices.
- Support a clean handover should a longer-term project manager be appointed later.
Required experience & skills
- Proven IT Project Manager with hands-on experience delivering website replatforms / transformations (headless CMS and/or e-commerce migration a strong plus).
- Jira — required. Able to configure and run delivery in Jira — issue types, workflows, boards, dependency links, and capacity/plans — not just read a board someone else built.
- Capacity planning and backlog management — writing clear, well-scoped tickets with acceptance criteria for a distributed team.
- Strong command of core PM disciplines: roadmap and critical-path planning, RAID, RACI, governance, and steering-committee reporting.
- Demonstrable ability to run multiple concurrent workstreams and stakeholder groups (architecture, functionality, content).
- Experience coordinating distributed / offshore teams across time zones.
- Strong senior-stakeholder communication.
- Delivery-focused: comfortable owning a time-boxed, fixed-scope engagement and driving it to completion.
Nice to have: exposure to Django / Wagtail / Saleor or similar Python / headless stacks; experience delivering membership, portal, or community platforms.
Engagement details
- Basis: full-time, temporary (interim).
- Duration: minimum 2-3 months.
- Extension: potential to extend (initially by a further month, then rolling month-to-month), tied to delivery — not to slippage on the core work.
- Longer term: on successful delivery, the engagement can become permanent and extend into the community-platform project.
