Recently my friend Mark Hudson posted about the inappropriateness of the term “sprint” for an agile project phase, preferring the cycling term “interval.” That post really struck a chord with me.

"Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success." - Pablo Picasso

It is an old story: about 30% of IT application projects succeed, 45% are "challenged," and the other quarter fail altogether.   That's the consistent result over the years of the Standish Group Study of Project Outcomes.  Jorge Dominguez, here, displays a chart of the remarkably similar results since 1994.  Not a pretty picture, right?  Some question the validity of the Standish studies, but Scott Ambler parallels the Standish story in a recent Dr Dobbs column called "Lies, Great Lies, and Software Development Project Plans," which itemizes the strategies commonly used by IT project managers to "stay out of trouble" when schedule/budget results don't match initial estimates.  For example, "18% change the original schedule to reflect the actual results".

Here are three things to remember when putting together a BI business case:

In a recent very thoughtful post on data quality, Paul Erb plays out an analogy comparing data users with Don Quixote and data quality professionals with Sancho Panza, then reverses the analogy to cleverly coin the “Sancho Panza” test of data quality professionals.  He encourages data quality professionals promoting the critical role of data quality to apply a what would Sancho say test to ensure tha