Managing IT to deal with Climate Change
Sharing spreadsheets
What’s the most useful project management tool there is? It’s not MS Project, or your favourite all-singing, all-dancing planning tool that allows you to create Gantt charts, do Earned Value Analysis, Critical Paths or any of the other (admittedly useful) techniques around project schedules.
In my book, it has got to be a spreadsheet, and the one I use is MS Excel.
I use it for budgets, risks-issues-actions registers, modelling anything and everything, and, of course, for tracking progress on the project. Particularly for rollouts to multiple sites or anything where a small set of tasks has to be repeated many times and the dependencies between the sets are not complex, a spreadsheet is often easier to use than a PM tool. Everyone has access to it, most people can use it, it’s simple to edit and print.
One problem is that it is hard to share spreadsheets, especially when there is more than one company involved and noone wants to provide access across corporate WANs. I’ll be talking more about this situation in the future, and tools you can use to work with partners in other companies, but, for now, I’m trying out Google Spreadsheets.
In one of my current projects, we’ve been using a spreadsheet to track progress on a rollout for about 80 sites. It has a few graphs and analysis tools to review and predict progress, and is used for regular reporting. We share this between ourselves and the main supplier, with one person from each company having prime responsibility. We put the data sheet of the workbook up into Google, and gave three people write permission – the two people who use it most, and myself – and the rest of the team read only access. That process was very simple, and we’re now able to update it easily. Core team members can always see the latest information.
Once a week, we’ll put it back into Excel and use the tools to analyse and report.
Google Spreadsheets is very easy to use and seems stable so far. We will be taking a copy daily and are being careful not to put any personal or corporate identification on it. Although I suspect Google are trustworthy, there’s no need to take risks.
This is a complement to Excel, not a replacement. It doesn’t do a lot of the fancy formatting or analysis that Excel can do, but it is excellent for sharing data and for having a discussion using the chat facility while making changes. If this pilot works, it will be a useful addition to my project management toolkit.
I must admit I’m curious about this kind of thing and how well it’s going to fare in the world where we can pass files to and fro almost at will – what’s the advantage in sharing them when we can so easy move them around.. and not lose any of the complicated formatting in the process etc.?
As a voice & presentation skills trainer I often find myself passing powerpoint decks back and forth to and from clients. It’s so easy to do I can’t see myself moving over to this kind of thing in the near future!
Besides, I’d rather trust my USB pen for carrying files with me than trust being able to access an internet connection when I get there to access a key file!