Customer Project Manager

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), 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:

• Independently manages small to medium project(s) of moderate complexity
• Accountable for delivery across scope, schedule, and stakeholder expectations and begins to influence delivery outcomes
• Builds direct customer relationships and ensures technical integration across workstreams
• Owns day-to-day customer engagement for assigned projects and uses delivery tools to document customer interactions
• Communicates project activities in terms of customer outcomes (e.g., timeliness, cost, and performance)
• Aligns customer requirements to scope of work and coordinates with delivery teams to ensure appropriate resources are engaged
• Builds and maintains relationships with customers and other appropriate resources (e.g., Consulting Engineers, Cisco account teams, Partners, technical and functional stakeholders)
• Defines standardized and automated processes for project planning, integrating milestones across related/adjacent project or program milestones
• Allocates deliverables across team members and ensures clarity of ownership and accountability
• Tracks progress using delivery tools and frameworks, leveraging AI and automation where possible
• Guides risk and issue analysis; identifies and escalates scope creep
• Determines required resources (e.g., people, tools, funding) to successfully meet project goals and monitors financial and material utilization to support forecast accuracy and delivery planning
• Demonstrates proficient knowledge in one or more engineering/technical domains and integrates with project management expertise
• Applies working knowledge of products and services to interpret customer needs and assess delivery risk
• Researches and plans to leverage tools to automate, standardize and streamline delivery process (e.g., risk tracking templates, resource allocation models); collaborates cross-functionally and participates in retrospectives to pilot improvements
• Collaborates with technical teams to scope solutions and validate feasibility
• Documents technical risks, dependencies, and lessons learned to inform future delivery
• Expands collaboration across internal teams and external partners to streamline escalations and accelerate issue resolution
• Begins to lead stakeholder discussions and influence alignment on delivery expectations
• Promotes a unified and consistent experience across Cisco and partner teams
• Influences team dynamics by promoting transparency, resolving minor conflicts, and encouraging shared ownership

Minimum Qualifications:
Bachelors + 5 years of related experience, or
Masters + 3 years of related experience, or
PhD + 0 years of related experience, or
equivalent relevant work experience
PM CAPM expected;

Preferred Qualifications:
PMP and CPMAI preferred
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.