Customer Project Manager
Meet the Team
This role leads and manages the full lifecycle of customer-facing projects and programs across Cisco technologies, from initiation through planning, execution, and closure, ensuring alignment with customer business goals and Cisco's strategic objectives. The position is accountable for the successful execution of projects and programs, including scope, schedule, budget, quality, and customer satisfaction, and provides regular updates to Service Delivery Managers (SDMs) and Customer Experience Managers (CXMs) to ensure transparency and alignment across delivery and customer adoption goals. Responsibilities include managing project-level budget execution, ensuring operational excellence through accurate project reflection in Cisco's systems and tools, overseeing financial forecasting and reporting, and maintaining compliance with delivery governance standards. The role also coordinates with Cisco's vendor management teams to source bids, recommend partner selections, and create statements of work (SOW) and terms and conditions (T&Cs), while collaborating with SDMs, who have final accountability for partner selection, SOW approval, and performance. The position operates within industry methodologies such as PMI and Agile, and Cisco's operational processes, ensuring compliance, financial responsibility, and rigorous governance through structured communications, risk and issue management, and stakeholder alignment. Additional duties include maintaining project governance by managing invoicing, payment tracking, and forecasting processes, executing change management strategies to ensure operational discipline and adherence to Cisco's business standards, applying AI and automation tools to streamline planning, reporting, risk detection, and closeout activities, and championing continuous improvement through lessons learned, retrospectives, and knowledge sharing across teams and engagements.
Your Impact
- Drive End-to-End Project Success: Lead complex, multi-stakeholder enterprise customer engagements from kick-off and discovery through deployment, value realization, and formal closeout.
- Advocate for the Customer: Serve as a trusted advisor and escalation point, driving rapid remediation of technical and operational blockers to maintain high customer confidence and NPS.
- Standardize Delivery Excellence: Leverage proven methodologies, blueprints, service offerings, and best practices to ensure predictable, high-quality outcomes.
- Project & Financial Ownership: Build and manage comprehensive project plans, schedules, milestone tracking, and project P&L/burn rates aligned to Statements of Work (SOWs).
- Transparent Reporting: Deliver rigorous stakeholder communication, covering progress against baselines, burn rates, critical dependencies, risk mitigation, and key assumptions.
- Forecast Accuracy: Maintain real-time documentation and PSA/system tracking to enable reliable revenue recognition, margin optimization, and resource forecasting.
- Compliance & Onboarding Navigation: Proactively manage customer-specific security, governance, and onboarding clearances (e.g., background checks, badging, network access protocols).
Minimum Qualifications:
- Education & Experience: Bachelor’s degree or 8+ years of related experience.
- External Customer Delivery: 5+ years of dedicated Project or Program Management experience delivering enterprise software cloud SaaS, or professional services to external enterprise clients.
- Methodology Expertise: Proven track record leading customer engagements across Agile (Scrum/Kanban), Waterfall, and Hybrid delivery frameworks.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Project Management Certifications: PMP (PMI-PMP), PMI-ACP, CPMAI, or PRINCE2 Practitioner strongly preferred.
Why Cisco?
At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era - and beyond. We’ve been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint.
Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you’ll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere.
We are Cisco, and our power starts with you.