Halloween is around the corner, but ghouls, goblins, and ghosts shouldn\u2019t worry you. You have a deadly horror lurking in the halls, hiding in the shadows of your conference rooms, and trapped in computers waiting to spring on you when you least expect it \u2013 spreadsheets. These spreadsheets are creating massacres across the industry, cannibalizing PMOs and sending them to early graves. Spreadsheets are killing project managers and team members by the masses all across the country. They spawn and duplicate like rabbits, with many species having inaccurate and outdated information \u2013 killing your credibility and reporting.<\/p>\n
While spreadsheets are advantageous for driving a stake through subjective and political decision making zombies, when used for project and portfolio management, they simply suck the life and blood out of you.<\/p>\n
Here are the top five ways spreadsheets are killing people like you\u2026consider yourself warned:<\/p>\n
Spreadsheets suck the lifeblood out of your efficiency \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n If you are like most, you are gathering data from multiple places and consolidating this information into a single spreadsheet. You spend countless hours finding the right data and organizing it for easy consumption. This puts a silver bullet through your heart as you are more focused on finding the right information from the right system, rather than focusing on analysis to increase project success.<\/p>\n Spreadsheets require a lot of manual work <\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s a manual process to gather all of the data and consolidate it into a spreadsheet, but the work doesn\u2019t end there with spreadsheets. You still have all of the manual calculations, reconciliation of the data, and creation of pivot tables, charts, and graphs to tell your story. It\u2019s like watching yourself dig your own grave with a plastic shovel \u2013 tremendously painful. Then you spend your time checking the formulas and adjusting the colors and formats of your visualizations \u2013 focusing more on the look and feel rather than the analysis and output.<\/p>\n Spreadsheets are deceiving and trick you <\/strong><\/p>\n As a system of record, spreadsheets invite trouble. Just open one, change a number or two, save it, and voila\u2014you\u2019ve rewritten history or better yet, allowing someone else to rewrite history. It\u2019s impossible to verify the accuracy of your numbers or track changes and soon you\u2019ll be haunted by misunderstandings, misinterpretation, and wasted time. When using spreadsheets, the zombies in the organization are just going to come to you for the latest information, so what was the point of that spreadsheet anyway?<\/p>\n