Systems development projects have a high failure rate. Often, the users of a system are dissatisfied with it because it does not meet their expectations. What is the cause and effect relationship between expectations and failure? No doubt, a poorly designed system will fail to meet expectations. But sometimes users have unrealistic expectations without regard for constraints of budget, time, manpower, etc., and the best system that developers could produce will go unused because it doesn’t meet these high expectations. In this latter case, the expectations were actually the cause of the failure, not the other way around. Perception can be more important than reality. Project managers have two things to manage: the development of the system and the perception of the system. For this paper, we are focusing on the latter aspect of project management: managing user expectations. (2001-08-19)