Project management in Excel – is it enough?

Project management, project scheduling, project planning … The process goes by many names, but it’s all the same thing: safely and securely bringing a project to port, preferably within an agreed-upon scope, deadline, and budget, and keeping both the customer and financial department happy.

Today, many tools offer professional project management: PPM, PRINCE2, SCRUM and the waterfall model, to name a few. Whatever you choose, you will always need to manage company workflows and deliveries efficiently. On the other hand, the type of system you choose can make a world of difference. Enter the controversial solution: Excel as a project management tool.

15 disadvantages: why Excel project management isn’t built to last

Excel has a wide array of benefits, notably in analysis and reporting features. Consultancy firms in particular need precise and detailed data, e.g. in connection with varying hourly rates management of fixed prices and time and material. Often, several projects run simultaneously for many different customers.

In these connections, Excel’s shortcomings, particularly in quickly illustrating key figures for generating project- or employee-based invoicing percentages, tend to come to the fore. This is especially true for cases where the same employee has different hourly rates depending on the type of project! As such, Excel is perfect for tasks such as analyses but falls short when it comes to proper project management. The main reasons are:

• Flexibility. Changing, for example, hourly rates or project tasks can prove troublesome. Likewise, project tasks repeated across tabs or spreadsheets can be problematic. Who’s responsible? And how do you avoid mistakes?
• Data security. Building on the former, who's responsible for data security if formulas are deleted and time registrations forgotten?
• Imprecise time registration. Time registration is not entirely accurate if not made as the event takes place. In Excel, time registration will always be entered subject to any bias, which typically follows data reconstruction. This not only affects the invoicing percentage but also affects the precision of the time registration. Ten minutes of imprecise time registration is no big deal on the whole. Still, if it occurs more than three times, it’s half an hour, which can affect the invoicing percentage and, ultimately, the result of the project in question if several employees do the same. Can you afford to lose five hours’ worth of invoicing?
• Long formulas. If each tab in an Excel spreadsheet holds one project, you can quickly end up with massive files containing more than 50 tabs. Sum totals are impressive, mile-long formulas – which all too often create problems as even the most minor mistakes are repeated in the spreadsheet.
• Non-standardised. No matter how the template is set up, one single standardised template to ensure complete consistency throughout the spreadsheets is utopian. People are not machines, so spreadsheets can take highly diverse forms depending on the employee’s experience, skills and problem-solving abilities.
• Data errors. How are these rectified? Needless to say, companies have to invest time and resources in keeping track of data and time registrations—and whose time and resources? The project manager? The resource coordinator? Management? Furthermore, recreating data is often difficult once the spreadsheet is closed—until the next employee opens it and discovers a data error.
• There is no mobility. Time registration, budget amendments, etc., are not easily portable. How many people open a massive file on their phone and track their time using the tiny columns?
• Not meant for project management. In short, Excel used to be an exemplary application for calculations and analyses. Later on, it was expanded with advanced reporting features. However, it will never rival professional tools in their ability to support quick changes to project tasks, hourly rates, complex fixed-price projects and invoicing.
• Complex. Presupposes extensive knowledge of designing efficient models and templates. Often, this event will be handled by the employee with the most project management or information technology experience. But what happens if this employee leaves the company?
• Less control, less overview. Let’s be honest: projects are complex. And something entirely different from accounts.
• The clear view. What has been invoiced, booked, or entered into the accounts? How do you get all three things to come together and create an effective exchange of data between spreadsheets? And how do you prevent exorbitant amounts of time from being spent retrieving these data, particularly across several spreadsheets?
• Standardised reports for your industry. There is no standardised way for Excel to retrieve data across tasks, projects, and employees, and it does not offer a complete package for time registration, hourly rates, etc., for invoicing.
• Level of completion. Many professional systems offer a view of open and closed tasks. Excel needs a series of formulas to display task statuses and whether the project is on track. Do you have the resources to maintain these data?
• Who owns this spreadsheet? Again, if several data versions exist, Excel is ineffective. Which spreadsheet is the right one? And how would you manage several possible spreadsheet versions on your shared drive? Who’s responsible for ensuring that only one spreadsheet containing all-time registrations exists?
• Best practice benefits. Using a standardised system, you can customise it to meet your needs and streamline your project management workflows. Often, business systems have developed over many years and are based on target-user best practices. In other words, you build on the experience of others, thereby saving resources.
  
  

“But we usually …”

There are many arguments for sticking with Excel. Then again, there are just as many arguments against sticking with it. At TimeLog, we’ve spoken with many companies who value Excel as a project management tool. Often, these companies decline to make the switch for the following reasons:

• Tradition. “We’ve always used Excel.”
• Internal disagreements. “Switching systems will result in too much of an internal power struggle, and we simply don’t have the resources for that now.”
• No knowledge of the alternatives. Many companies using Excel or other ”homemade” systems don’t have the resources to research the possibilities and benefits of professional systems.
• “It’s much too expensive.” Granted, a professional project management system costs money compared to Excel, which comes with the Office package. On the other hand, how much money is spent in-house correcting data and fault-proofing in Excel that might otherwise have been spent on invoicing? Over time, Excel is an administrative burden that slowly becomes part of the daily grind. But consider how many of these hours might have been spent running your business instead. Also, time registration using Excel is often inadequate and imprecise. For instance, try calculating your monthly invoicing percentage based on a mere extra half hour a week per employee. For ten employees, that’s five or 20 hours a month. Even though Excel is included in the Office package, it can prove costly.
• There is no time for implementation. Employees need to work faster and faster. Effective implementation of an external system can prove costly. In the long run, however, it may prove one of the best investments you ever made, as many features are cleared or become far less time-consuming and manageable.
• No system-responsible employee acting as supporter and super-user. Small companies often have minimal resources. As a result, switching to a new system may seem impossible, as the responsibility is usually personally vested in management or the CEO. And we all know the stress and long hours of being a small-company leader.

Whether you choose to continue using Excel or opt for a professional project management system such as TimeLog, considering where most of your project management resources are placed may prove time well spent.

What are the pros and cons? How many half hours can you afford to lose due to imprecise time registration, provided it even meets the invoicing deadline? Imagine being able to analyse data and consequently your company using the same tool you use for time registration and project management instead of having to maintain data in Excel with all the uncertainties that go with it.

How many invoiceable hours can you afford to ignore?