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.
What You’ll Do:
•Typically responsible for end-to-end delivery of medium to large projects or components of programs
•Manages multiple workstreams and ensures alignment with Cisco’s operational processes and reporting standards
•Maintains strong customer relationships and ensures technical and operational alignment across delivery
•Owns project representation in Cisco’s business systems (e.g., financial forecast, partner engagement status)
•Aligns customer requirements to scope and delivery plans, ensuring the right resources are engaged to meet business needs
•Leads solution discussions with customers, connecting business priorities to delivery outcomes
•Tracks customer satisfaction metrics and feedback, supports contract change coordination with SDMs and sales, and helps address escalations and drive adoption
•Integrates multiple dynamic inputs (e.g., customer feedback, project/program metrics) to drive innovation and maximize customer outcomes
•Nurtures ongoing relationships with customers and a range of delivery partners
•Oversees execution of project plans and contract change processes; ensures cross-functional coordination and adherence to operational standards
•Anticipates and mitigates conflicts across workstreams through scenario planning and stakeholder alignment
•Allocates and evaluates resource needs (e.g., training, tools, funding), creates contingency plans (backup allocations and schedule buffers), and proactively manages scope creep
•Provides revenue and cost forecasts using Cisco's financial systems; monitors project-level financials to support delivery margin and forecast accuracy
•Manages partner engagement and governance, including sourcing SOWs, invoice tracking and contract compliance
•Demonstrates working knowledge of multiple engineering/technical domains and provides domain knowledge transfer to junior team members
•Contributes to PM community in a variety of ways, which may include developing scalable project management tools and practices and applying AI technologies (e.g., AI-powered project risk prediction and workflow optimization)
•Tracks and analyzes delivery KPIs (e.g., defect rates, deployment timelines) to identify improvement opportunities
•Proactively proposes optimizations to delivery processes and tooling based on data and feedback
•Strengthens customer relationships and fosters strategic collaboration across projects or programs within CX
•Establishes and leads project governance models, ensuring clarity of roles, success metrics, and KPIs across stakeholders
•Takes single-threaded ownership of complex programs, integrating delivery across projects, programs, or teams as relevant
•Mentors peers and introduces scalable collaboration models to improve consistency and efficiency
Minimum Qualifications:
Bachelors + 7 years of related experience, or
Masters + 4 years of related experience, or
PhD + 1 year of related experience, or
equivalent relevant work experience
PMP and CPMAI expected
Preferred Qualifications:
Technical certification preferred (e.g., CCST Networking, CCST Security, CCNA)

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.