7) Many information technology project managers come from senior technical positions. What can you do to help them transition into a project management role?

Transitioning from a purely technical role to a project manager role cannot be easy. For the most part, it requires a change in focus from whatever part of a project you may typically have worked on to focusing on the overall picture. Having technical experience and expertise is incredibly valuable for a project manager as it will allow them to make better decisions about the direction of a project, but it can also come with some challenges. The biggest challenges would most likely come from the constraints that a project manager has to deal with on a regular basis.

While an informed project manager may have excellent ideas for what a project should be, it is important to take a step back and make sure that everything will fall within the triple constraints of cost, time, and scope. I believe that, at first, a person transitioning from a technical role may have some difficulty in budgeting resources around those constraints. While some interaction with end users and business heads is inevitable in a technical role, many of the discussions that impact how a project can proceed take place without developers being present. As long as the transitioning project manager can accept that sometimes business rules will conflict with what they may view as the most efficient solution for a project, they should be able to handle the duties of a project manager.