The second source of delusion is the collection of beliefs about what users (and executives) will do. In the heat of a sales cycle, there are suppositions about how often something will be needed, or how much time someone will be willing to spend on a common task. This leads to overestimating the importance of some items, and underestimating the cost of (or resistance to) some activities or processes. In some cases, change management is simply assumed away. This leads to bad politics on top of confused priorities.

There is nothing with more leverage than vetting requirements, identifying the ones that can be left until later (especially if "later" slips into "never").

The solution here is to get some reality into the picture. Have an outsider do confidential interviews of users and executives to find out where the hot buttons and booby-traps are. This is best done individually, in private (not in the group-think of focus groups), with questions designed to discover unrealistic assumptions. Here are some things to watch for:

• Will a given report or dashboard actually change a business decision?

• If the report were working but was based on 3% bad data, would it be useless? What about 8% bad data?