When all you do is buying and integrating with other companies, it becomes very difficult to manage, spending money buying is less than 50% of the efforts, integrating is headache, that’s why a company like Cisco has too many project managers who are not technical at all and are stumbling blocks for any true tech companies.
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Best will not look into Cisco.
Low hanging fruits are dreaming to be hired by Cisco.
It depends on your org and project - whether the project managers are a help or a hinderance. I've seen both sides - I've seen terrible project managers agree to do mediocre projects that have no future, then make a bunch of people do work towards something that is pointless, with whole teams being LRed for the trouble.
I've also seen project managers that handle important and helpful work like creating the documentation and support knowledge base for feature releases, integrating tools, helping offer structures work, and getting people organized for revenue generating efforts.
A quality project manager can make a work effort smooth as butter (by keeping everyone on track, organizing tons of useless meetings into one or two program level calls, and tracking down/removing risks and roadblocks). A mediocre one can make a project feel like your slogging through mud (with adding extra useless meetings, tooting their own ho-n, pushing others to do work they're not interested in or isn't their role, or getting in the way of innovation with "signoff" proceedures). I've had both varieties of project managers on varrious effots.
We need to hire and train the best, and retain them, so we have smooth as butter, rather than mud. Losing our best to other companies through attrition and layoffs, is a downward spiral.
Many PMs defer to "process" / DMAIC certification level (aka Green Belts, Black Belts) "necessity", to justify their own existence. In turn, these lead to bloated, overpaid PMO hierarchy, unnecessary budget and approval process; somehow lead by the DMAIC enlightened ones, who they themselves can only be sanctioned to make decisions.
How do I know? I'm one of them. I BS'd my existence for a good five years and $750,000 salary and bonus over that time. Then my boss left, I ended up in another org chart, and was (finally; Thank You!), LR'd. I did about 1/4th of the actual effort paid; but can do a good powerpoint and present well. Other than that, the money I was paid was mostly a waste of Cisco money.
BS in, BS out, but PMs ensure everyone stays busy by creating non-sense JIRA activities and directors stay happy seeing teams busy doing stuff, enabling justification for their fat check.