Digital Delivery Manager in Blandford Forum

Owns cross‑squad delivery planning and execution for KFC Africa’s digital portfolio. Turning roadmaps into on‑time, on‑standard releases across all markets. Owns the quarterly planning process (e.g., Big Room/PI planning), aligns goals, capacity, and dependencies into a realistic plan with clear sequencing and commitments. Aligns to the Digital and Technology strategy, global standards, and the future architecture roadmap, coordinating squads and vendors through discovery → build → test → release → hypercare. Ensures predictability, quality, and readiness by running the release calendar, managing dependencies/risks, and keeping stakeholders informed.

What this role delivers:

• A single, source‑of‑truth integrated plan (backlogs → sprints → releases) with critical path, dependencies, and capacity view.
• Quarterly planning (BRP/PI) ownership: prep and facilitation (templates, submissions, capacity calculation, dependency mapping), decision forums, and final plan sign‑off with OKRs/commitments.
• Release management: cut‑over plans, entry/exit criteria, runbooks, rollback/hypercare; zero surprise deployments.
• RAID governance: active risk, assumption, issue, and dependency logs with clear owners and due dates; timely escalation.
• Quality gates & standards: verification that NFRs (security, privacy, performance, accessibility) and enablement checklists are met before go‑live.
• Status reporting & communications: weekly packs and steerco updates with progress, variances, decisions needed, and next steps.
• Vendor & SOW coordination: align deliverables, SLAs, and acceptance; track commercial impacts of scope or timeline changes.

Communication Required:

• Channel Leads, Product Managers & Brand: Sequence backlog items, align on scope/acceptance, and confirm market rollouts.
• Enablement Lead & Solution Architect: Validate plans against standards/NFRs; coordinate change, security/privacy approvals, and technical readiness.
• Engineering & QA/Vendors: Run ceremonies (planning, stand‑ups, demos), manage blockers, confirm test coverage, UAT, and sign‑offs.
• Markets (country digital/ops leads): Coordinate training, menu/content, payments/tenders, store readiness, and hypercare.
• Security/Privacy/Legal & Finance/Procurement: Track approvals, data/privacy requirements, and commercial impacts; ensure SOW alignment.
• Customer Care/Operations: Align incident processes, communications plans, and post‑launch feedback loops.

Problem Solving and Analysis:

• Critical path & capacity conflicts: Build options (re‑sequence, scope trade‑offs, parallelization) to protect key dates; quantify impact.
• Release risk management: Assess readiness vs. criteria; plan rehearsals and fallbacks; coordinate multi‑system cutovers (POS, payments, CRM, aggregators).
• Quality & defect control: Interpret test results, triage defects, and decide ship/hold; ensure telemetry for early detection.
• Environment & data readiness: Prevent env drift; secure test data; plan performance/load tests and sign‑offs.
• Multi‑market rollout: Stage deployments, flighting/canary strategies, and blackout windows; manage localization dependencies.
• Vendor variance: Address delivery slippage/SLA breaches with remediation plans and contract levers.
• Reporting & decisioning: Separate signal from noise; surface the few decisions that unblock the most work.

Innovation:

• Enhances delivery processes and tooling. Implements automated status dashboards, release checklists, and quality gates in CI/CD; improves Jira/boards hygiene and flow efficiency; introduces canary/feature‑flag practices with Enablement to reduce change failure and cycle time.

Supervisory Responsibilities:

• No direct or indirect reports.

Related Experience Requirements / Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Business/IS/Engineering or equivalent practical experience.
• SAFe/Agile, PRINCE2/PMP certificates required.
• 5–7+ years delivering digital products/projects in multi-vendor, multi market environments.
• Strong command of Agile/iterative delivery (planning, ceremonies, metrics) and release/change/incident practices.
• Working knowledge of NFRs and standards (security, privacy, performance, accessibility) and how to operationalize them.
• Tooling fluency (e.g., Jira/Confluence, test management, release orchestration, dashboards).
• Excellent stakeholder management and communication; crisp risk/issue framing and escalation.

Working Conditions:

• Hybrid office environment, with minimum 3-days in office, frequent cross‑time‑zone collaboration. Travel 10 – 20% across African markets for launches, visits, and vendor reviews. Occasional evening/weekend work for release windows or incident response. Typical risks are schedule pressure and context switching.

Future State of the Position:

• Evolves toward Release Train Engineer / Senior Delivery responsibilities across more squads/markets, with deeper automation of planning and release workflows, SLO‑based change management, and tighter integration with global delivery practices.