I’m in a board room, addressing the assembled bunch of socially challenged IT management and hangers-on.

I explain in simple language how they can and should do Enterprise Data Warehousing iteratively and agilely, and why they should do it that way and not take other approaches. I also explain how to do Business Intelligence, again, both iteratively and agilely.

They, the assembled suits, wring their hands and say “we can’t do it any differently now, we have to deliver everything we promised by September, or we are screwed”.

Are these fucking guys for real? So I reply “Listen, I know you have said that you have to deliver everything by September, but take my word for it. Break this up into iterative sized chunks, actually deliver things that people will use and be delighted with – which is within the realms of the possible, and then you can apologise in September when you haven’t delivered all that you promised, because you would have never managed to deliver these things anyway. If you do it your way, you will reach September and you would have delivered the square root of fuck all. Deliver some things that people embrace and use and then the management people will not think that you and yours are as thick as whale omelettes, and they will forgive you, and let you carry on.”

What do they do?

What do you think?

I get “Listen, you are my Product and Programme Manager, and you need to tell me that you can deliver all of this by September. There is no alternative. You need to give us a project end-date of September”

My response: “Look, you tried to boil the enterprise data ocean be doing everything in one big bang approach. When that looked to be faltering – as this approach always will – you hired a bunch of guys who know the square root of duck all about Data Marts and Business Intelligence, to build you Data Mart and Business Intelligence capabilities. What did you honestly expect?”

I look at the clock on the wall, and ask myself “Why are they so many fucking dumb-ass Dodos working in IT management?”

More to the point, why isn’t anyone doing anything about the institutionalised chaos that is to be found in so much of IT.