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S P O N S O R S H I P
Excel struggle bus
While the software is a proven workhouse for data storage and analysis, there are 7 good reasons to stop using it to manage your projects
Editor’s note: ProjectBoss was a sponsor of the 2018 Hot Firm + A/E Industry Awards Conference in Dallas. I get it. It’s right there on your desktop, occupying the same spot it did 25 years ago. The familiar green icon beckons you to click on it, open your project “template” (complete with 17 different tabs), and start filling in the blanks. A few hours later (and several skipped sections and tabs), you have an outline, some graphs, and maybe some charts. You save it on the shared drive, send an email to the project team (forgetting to include a few people), and off you go.
Mark Little GUEST SPEAKER
Half the team doesn’t even bother to open it and look at it. In the following days and weeks, the Excel file isn’t updated and gets stale. In a panic, you open it two hours before your meeting and scramble to get input from your team to hopefully have a reasonably accurate document. It’s usually weeks or months after the project is over before you have a complete financial picture of the project, which was probably late and over budget. Rinse and repeat. It’s a recipe for frustration and failure. Don’t kick yourself too hard. You’re not alone on the Excel struggle bus, and we have a solution to put an end to your Excel nightmares once and for all.
Here are seven reasons to stop using Excel for project management: 1)Lack of Gantt charts. Yes, you can drag and ex- pand columns, change background colors, enlarge fonts, etc. However, updating tasks and milestones becomes a major chore. And forget about creating dependencies between tasks. Gantt charts are a much easier and better solution to laying out your projects. Just click, drag, and drop. You also won’t need to print out several pieces of paper and tape them together to get everything to line up properly for your meeting.
See MARK LITTLE, page 12
THE ZWEIG LETTER October 22, 2018, ISSUE 1269
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