5 ways spreadsheets are killing your PMO (and why you should be using project management software to stay competitive)

1. MEETINGS COSTS

The estimated cost of poorly organised meetings in the US in 2019 was $399 billion. Furthermore, 47% of US employees complain that meetings waste their time.

PROBLEM: Having all project activities managed in offline spreadsheets creates a delay from when all tasks are together to the time they are collectively reviewed by the Senior Management Team. This means that the majority of time spent in meetings will be dedicated to getting everyone 'up-to-speed' and validating information. Meetings are more status update-oriented and produce less action items & take aways.

SOLUTION: PMO enterprise software enhances sense-of-accountability and sense of urgency among task owners through the transparency that all tasks, their due dates and their statuses are clearly visible to everyone in real time. This will ensure that a more efficient way in agreeing each meeting's agenda prior to its commencement. Furthermore, alerts & e-mails tell stakeholders in real time when there is indication of project slow-down. By having this feature, the tactical reprioritisation of meeting agenda topics & their required participants becomes easier and more frequent.

RESULT: Less meetings are required with less attendees and more action items are agreed.

2. REPORTING COSTS

In this day and age, if you happen to walk by your copy room and see a 50 kg HP printer which resembles a small battle tank in rapid-fire mode producing massive amounts of full-colour 50-page presentations destined for the executive board room for a monthly status update meeting, you should already know that something is not right.

PROBLEM: A recent study showed that Project Managers claim to spend 1 or more days a week manually collating and distributing reports to stakeholders. Prior to arriving at the printer however, the majority of the time spent by today's Project Manager includes;

• 01Preparing spreadsheets
• 02Distributing spreadsheets to project participants via e-mail
• 03Collecting and saving spreadsheets (via e-mail)
• 04Reconciling, cleaning and consolidating spreadsheets
• 05Transferring spreadsheet data to PowerPoint presentations for reporting

SOLUTION: With real-time visibility into all task lists from its dashboard, PM software standardises reporting and eliminates the need for a 'middle-man' to collect offline information to review, clean, repackage and distribute through status update reporting (e.g. PowerPoint presentations).

RESULT: The data collection, validation and compilation process is drastically reduced (if not eliminated) as well as the time spent e-mailing and printing. Project Managers spend more time pursuing problems raised and less time identifying, validating and reporting them.

3. PERSONNEL AND OVERTIME COSTS

To drive change across an organisation requires successful collaboration among all stakeholders. This will allow for the business leads who are impacted most by the change being implemented to have confidence in the action plan prior to giving their buy-in decision.

PROBLEM: As one can deduce, a change management program built on an offline, spreadsheet-based information repository comes with heavy personnel costs to maintain it.

Wide-scale complex initiatives can often be characterised not only by a large group of project managers charged to manage the spreadsheets-dependent information, but also by the excessive work hours required from the subject matter experts to complete those spreadsheets often in the hours that are outside their day-to-day business obligations.

SOLUTION: As project owners and subject matter experts develop a more 'real-time' relationship, information updates come with greater frequency while the time intervals spent by subject matter experts are drastically reduced as they update their task lists directly into the application adding their notes, statuses and attachments.

This methodology reduces the risk that large exercises will be postponed until the last minute creating a high-stress situation compromising the quality of data collected due to the time constraint.

Project Managers & stakeholders can observe, review and comment in 'real time' accelerating the risk identification and decision making process.

RESULT: Less project managers required and less overtime hours paid to business participants due to a more tactical, real-time, day-to-day focus.

4. THE COST OF SLOW DECISION MAKING

It is believed that up to 33% of projects fail due to lack of involvement from Senior Management and that 41% of organisations reporting poor project performance say they don't get enough support from project management and project sponsors.

PROBLEM: By relying on a spreadsheet-dependent, manual reporting process, it is no surprise that the decision making process becomes increasingly slower when doubts arise and Senior Management is not satisfied with the '30,000-foot view' and seek additional details prior to taking action.

SOLUTION: A good PM software package offers 360° transparency into all initiatives allowing any Senior Leader to quickly identify where areas of risk exist and zoom in (aka drill down) to the granular details with just a few clicks.

Like any dashboard, figures should be intuitive and reportable both when 'rolled up', as well as when 'drilled down' giving Senior Management a view by business division, department and all the way down to the individual Team Leader level.

RESULT: Areas of risk are visible to Senior Management in real time and decisions to take corrective actions are made more swiftly and with higher levels of confidence. When an area requires additional focus, all involved parties can collectively work together virtually and to their own schedule. In short, poor stakeholder alignment on tactical activities becomes a thing of the past.

5. THE COST OF FORGETTING

Research shows that within 24 hours people forget an average of 70 percent of new information and within a week, 'the forgetting curve' claims an average of 90 percent of it.

PROBLEM: With the success of a change management initiative heavily dependent on the efficiency of the know-how transfer process, it should be no surprise to learn that when relying on offline tools such as spreadsheets for knowledge management, that a high quantity of know-how is lost during each hand off of information.

This, not to mention that any lessons learnt along the way may also be buried in the 'black hole' of knowledge and reserved only to those who know where to locate it offline.

SOLUTION:Being well structured and having real-time direct accessibility to your project task list and all its support material, PM software minimises the number of business hand offs while maximising visibility into activities underway.

With alert and e-mail notifications, as project contributors enrich their task list, any interested parties can review and interact when necessary in real time.

With each project, notes, comments, attachments, photos, etc. are captured, tagged and archived for future readers. This allows your company to quickly locate and utilise the key know-how acquired during each initiative and necessary to transfer skills from one staff member to the next.

RESULT:The standardised structure offered by the software package on how projects are setup, grouped, assigned and reported give management the opportunity to quickly locate comments, notes and attachments while flagging and sharing lessons learnt along the way.

Equally impressive is how your entire company will embrace and standardise its approach in the project setup phase by ensuring that a project charter and RACI-supported project governance setup template is agreed by your steering committee and used regularly to ensure that all founding principles and core dependencies are revisited in key moments. This type of know-how is fundamental to driving change in your organisation for it reduces confusion from excessive bureaucracy and enhances sense of accountability and sense of ownership and will continue to be used and transferred with every new change management endeavor.

CONCLUSION

Software itself is not going to identify and solve all your administrative burden pains from project management autonomously but your Project Management Team certainly will if they are empowered to do so and are equipped with the right software solution.

As always, the success of your implementation will be directly dependent on the level of support from Senior Management which I cannot begin to highlight enough is crucial in an endeavor such as adopting a software solution to manage your PMO.

That said, there are a couple of big decisions ahead of you to ensure that investing in an enterprise project management solution is a wise decision for which I have included below a list of questions to begin to ask yourself as you commence the software selection process.

Coming from a Lean background and having spent 17 years working as a change manager in multinational organisations, I take the opportunity to present our own enterprise project management solution built on the core principles of continuous improvement and the famous PDCA (plan-do-check-act) logic. If of interest to you and your company, I will be most delighted to send an informational brochure and eventually make our team available to provide you and with an introductory consultation and product demo Webinar.

Finally, whether you are in the market for change management software or not, if topics of such are of interest, please feel free to connect with me or follow our company page which publishes high quality content on a weekly basis.

What to ask before you migrate to an enterprise PM platform

• 01Is your Senior Management Team comfortable in using on a weekly (sometimes daily) basis a dashboard which will be the primary and first source of risk escalation information?
• 02Is your Senior Management team ready to relinquish up to 60% of its meetings dedicated to status updates in exchange for a more direct relationship with your PMO and the in-scope stakeholders?
• 03What level of accessibility and usage to your software solution will you give your project owners and subject matter experts?
• 04Will your PMO dedicate the required time to ensure proper training and ongoing support to those subject matter experts and project owners who have been identified as key product users?
• 05Who will be the undisputed owner of the software solution training having a mandate to escalate to Senior Management in the event that the users are not providing timely and accurate information in the system?