Gustav Toppenberg

Gustav Toppenberg is a Sr. PMO Manager in Cisco's Communication & Collaboration IT group. Gustav is currently responsible for leading the PMO and driving project and operational excellence in his team. During his career at Cisco, Gustav has led several projects in change leadership, acquisition integration, and globalization strategy. He is also part of Cisco IT's transition to a services-oriented organization (technology, process, and culture), enabling a client-focused, value-driven, cost-effective alignment between IT and business. Gustav is a native of Denmark and serves on the board of directors at the Danish-American Chamber of Commerce in San Francisco and the NorCal chapter of ASP (Association for Strategic Planning). He has a background in strategy consulting, program/project management, and global change management. Gustav has an interest and passion for the convergence of business and technology; he is a natural change leader and constant disruptor. He continuously seeks to occupy the gap between business and technology, thereby leveraging technology solutions to strengthen competitive advantages in business. Gustav is an MBA graduate of the Thunderbird School of Global Management, ranked the #1 U.S. Business School for International Business by the Wall Street Journal and U.S. News and World Report. You can contact Gustav at gustav.toppenberg@cisco.com "Some of the individuals posting to this site work for Cisco Systems, Inc. Opinions expressed here and in any corresponding comments are the personal opinions of the original authors, not those of Cisco."

Mind the ‘Strategy-Execution’ Gap

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“Companies typically realize only about 60% of their strategy’s potential value because of defects and breakdowns in planning and execution.”- Harvard Business Review

Today’s challenging economic climate forces every company across the globe to keep a laser focus on the bottom line, and executives are under close watch to deliver key strategies. So why is it that so many companies continue to suffer from a strategy-execution gap? And what can the PM do to help close the gap?

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Corporate development & finance – Business value from the corporate perspective

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Now it is time to explore how these services and capabilities are viewed by the enterprise in terms of true business value and competitive advantage. Corporate development concerns itself with the management arm of the enterprise, setting the strategy and priorities, and ensuring that the enterprise wide investments are aligned with future strategic goals.

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Enterprise Architecture – Linking Teams to the Enterprise

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Now that the linkage between the delivery and operations of the service has been established and the PM understands how the service enables a capability, it is time to make the connection between the delivery team and the organization.

I believe that helping the PM understand EA and its links to Business Architecture (BA) will help to crystallize the role that their delivery team plays in the broader scope of the enterprise.

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Linking Project Delivery & Services to Business Value

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To continue to add value to the enterprise, I believe that the PM role needs to continue to evolve more in the direction of a strategic business manager, linking the project delivery to business value. Excelling not only at delivering a project to the stakeholder, the PM needs to understand how the service delivered, as a result of the project, accelerates a business capability and helps the enterprise leverage current services in-place, as well as the life-cycle of these services, skills that are immensely important to the enterprise success.

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