Radical Project Management

So, What Are Expectations?

The word expectations has probably been abused and misunderstood more than any other word in the computing culture. To many project managers and systems analysts, expectations are simply those elements of the “requirements” that were not specified by the client. To others, expectations are the difference between what the client wants and what they really need. For the battle-hardened project manager, expectations are a wish list that begins a series of hard negotiations to reduce the expectations to minimum requirements. Finally, expectations are a hopelessly vague set of fuzzy requirements that defy documentation.

However, it is our experience that expectations are a related set of specific requirements that can be ...