Embedded Delivery on an Enterprise CMS-to-WordPress Replatforming Program

The situation

A large U.S. education organization was replatforming its flagship marketing website from an enterprise CMS to WordPress. The redesign and re-write were the visible goals, driven by a multi-year decline in conversion, but the platform change carried longer stakes: the organization operated a large portfolio of sites on the incumbent CMS and viewed this build as the first step in a gradual portfolio-wide migration to WordPress. The delivery team was a distributed WordPress agency working alongside the organization’s internal web and marketing teams.

What I did

I joined at the discovery phase in 2023, brought in through the agency to evaluate the existing WordPress build and the migration plan. In 2024 the role formalized: I signed an individual consulting agreement and statement of work directly with the organization and embedded with the delivery team through launch-critical phases, including daily testing and deployment standups with the client’s internal engineers and QA staff.

Because this engagement is under NDA, I will not describe the specific systems built. The shape of the role was senior delivery capacity inside an enterprise program: working within the client’s deployment process, their testing cadence, and their coordination between an external agency and an internal web team.

The engagement

The engagement ran across two phases totaling roughly two years, from agency-side discovery in 2023 through a direct consulting agreement that ran from mid-2024 until the program’s contracts concluded in late 2025. Enterprise replatforming programs succeed or fail on process discipline, and the daily standup cadence with internal teams reflects the level of integration the client required.