Question: I'm about to enter a role as project manager. I have attended a lot of projects with quite a span of aspects, constraints, contents, parties and whatever and also had some technical leadership tasks but this time it would be the very first time to receive the label "project manager".

While I'm thinking about it (I have some weeks/months left, it'll be mainly about software and electronics) I oscillate between "this is incredibly difficult, I wasn't aware of that.." and "this is so trivial, what's the deal?".

Actually, the project constraints (time, budget..) have to be met by everyone, so what is the real task despite of having a kickoff meeting, distributing tasks and occasional meetings about the status?

What I especially wonder about are the followings:

* How do I "make" others do their work? I mean it's ultimately their job but when someone is slow, maybe due to reasons like it's more difficult than expected or whatever, what could a project manager do then?
* Projects always have some kind of uncertainty and in my opinion it is nearly impossible to check all possible risks and minimize them. I'm especially thinking about some projects in the past which involved chemical experiments (which were quite a hazzle and turned from 2-3 months to 12-18 months..) and also mechanical engineering where single pieces also took way longer due to occupied machines, limitd materials and so on. You can hardly make an external workshop work faster when it's simply not possible and replacing one with another will quite a while to discuss and set up everything so there would hardly be any acceleration.

Wanna' share some minds and/or experiences?

Answer: 
No project has a 100% chance of success. So there's that.

For R&D, the project itself is not the product. It is research and development. It's a service-oriented project. Therefore, you would be reimbursed for the service, not what is produced or not produced. The output for a service-oriented project is a change in state. For R&D, that state is knowledge. At the end of an R&D project, the customer is smarter than before the project on whatever the customer was researching.

Therefore, you would create the type of reimbursement to be consistent with a service, which is typically cost plus fee on a time basis, i.e., T&M.
Can you divide the project into phases and tasks?
Can you provide a report, a review, prototype software and its code or some other deliverables of value for the customer?
You may be able to mitigate the risks by doing that.

Are you supposed to be an expert with the domain knowledge? Or you are expected to carry out research on behalf of the customer? Then they can pay for your time, but also will want to have the ownership intellectual property and created associated with it.

You should also manage the customer's expectation and try to negotiate the best outcome for both parties.