I was listening to a podcast recently featuring TV writer Rob Long. During the podcast he said (I'm paraphrasing) that, in order to be successful, one needs to learn to improvise, because nothing in life ever goes as planned. One of my favorite sayings is, "If you want to make God laugh, tell him what you're doing tomorrow."

And so it is with managing data. No matter how much we plan, whether it's a new system implementation, a new process, or just collecting a new set of data, what we plan and expect and what actually happens are rarely the same. And sometimes they are radically different!

And so we have to learn to improvise. We have to be flexible enough to react to what actually happened, adapt to it, and continue moving forward. After all, we're seeking success, not perfection.