“Hey, can you resend me that stakeholder summary? I’m sorry, but I can’t remember if it was an Excel file in the Teams storage or a PowerPoint presentation.”
Does that sound familiar?
Most project teams use various tools to create project artifacts and can sometimes be undisciplined with storage protocols. This causes frustration and wastes time when people try to track things down, but we think there’s a bigger problem than time wasted searching.
Spreadsheet Risk
We tread carefully here. Our chief product strategist, Sharon, is a Microsoft MVP. She loves an Excel spreadsheet, but even she must admit that tracking projects on Excel carries significant risk.
What do we mean by spreadsheet risk?
- Skills gapsDespite being around since 1985, most business users have a very limited skillset in Excel. They don’t have the skills to use the functions needed to analyse data to gather success metrics that drive conversations properly. The average user is uncomfortable with IF statements, Lookup Functions, Pivot Tables, and conditional formatting, which are needed to create even the most basic information dashboard.
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Spreadsheet errors
Spreadsheets do the calculations you ask them to. If you don’t build in error checking, it’s easy to miss mistakes. It’s easy to accidentally not update calculations when new data is added or to have people type or delete information in critical cells that should be protected.
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Expertise attribution
If you are lucky enough to have an Excel ninja on your team who builds you something magnificent, what happens when they move on? Macros fail, and nobody knows how to fix them. The dashboard must be updated to show a new financial year; nobody knows how to add the date to the filter. Your IT department is unlikely to be able to support you, and you limp along with a broken spreadsheet.
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Overcomplexity
We see this all the time.
Ooh! Look how clever this is! You can have a bar chart or a pie chart; you can see it by month, quarter, or day.
Many clients interested in ChangePlan proudly show us their existing Power BI models. They’re often beautiful and clever, but they don’t have an easy-to-use data entry interface, so most change team members can’t quickly enter data. When data is added, it often fails to tell a story that drives conversation actions.
In one of our previous articles we explained the differences between data and information and the importance of having metrics that drive conversations.
If you’re running your projects on multiple spreadsheets make sure you mitigate the spreadsheet risks we’ve listed.
Perhaps it’s time to get a demo of ChangePlan and leave the spreadsheets behind. Sorry Sharon!
