You need a thick skin to be a project manager.

Don’t expect to be adored.  If you do the job well you’ll get some colleagues’ (often very senior colleagues’) hackles up by probing into areas where things may be going pear shaped.

Don’t expect any thanks.  You’ll end up doing all sorts of tasks from writing business cases to arranging tea and coffee for meetings and everything in between. You may be disappointed if you’re expecting any thanks for this stuff, even when the jobs you are completing are outside of your remit.

Don’t expect others to treat you as you treat them.  You may have an internal code of conduct that says something like, ‘I will never bitch about someone else without first taking the issue up with them directly in a diplomatic kind of way‘. Not everyone shares your values, and you may find colleagues sharing their opinions of you with your boss without them first addressing their concerns to you!

If you do your job well, nothing will go wrong and people will assume the PM role is easy and possibly superfluous.  Conversely, if you make a dogs dinner of it, you can wow colleagues with your calmness under pressure and heroic, stoic side. Perverse huh.

Despite all this, you couldn’t possibly tempt me to do anything else