That Took A Lot Of Courage
It takes a lot of courage to step back from a the brink like that and publicly too. I salute you.
To back up Scott's point and at the risk of being accused of being Job's comforter here, there is also my book Practical Data Migration - the first chapter of which has a fable in it of a project going wrong that reads spookily like your experience. Well maybe not so spookily given that it is, unfortunately a far from uncommon experience. As you say rigorous Data Quality assessment before we start based on a realistic understanding of how much our business colleagues can accomplish on top of their day jobs is key. PDM has methods in it for accomplishing this. I recommend to anyone new to Data Migration, or still scarred by the last time they were involved to do the reading.
Best of luck to you next time around, I'm sure it will go fine.
Johny
