« PRINCE2™ Process Overview - PRINCE2™ Stages
Leadership and Project Management »

Project Management Software Or Excel - An Evaluation

July 3, 2008 | Author: admin | Filed under: Computer Based Information Systems

Project Management Software Or Excel - An Evaluation
By Volker Bendel

“I just couldn’t do without Excel!” This is something heard all over again when running project management software courses for account managers. Spreadsheets are used for calculating budgets, recording costs and income, calculating profitability by comparing both and much more. Even client facing documents, such as quotations and sales invoices are often prepared in spreadsheets rather than word processing applications putting up with reduced dtp functions in favor of the added mathematical features.

A spreadsheet has its uncontested benefits:

  • one can work on it without being connected to a database or server
  • it can easily be converted or integrated into word processing, presentation or internet files
  • it is easy to link external files into it
  • xls-formats are widely compatible, even to open source applications
  • the user has complete flexibility to add functions, text and graphics into it

Exactly those points appear to be lacking from an integrated project management system:

  • you need to be connected to a database
  • other applications cannot easily insert information from the database
  • there is no flexible linking of other applications into the database
  • the database compatibility is restricted to the use of the same application or application language
  • changes by the user to how the program itself works are restricted

When organisations introduce an integrated project management software one of the major hurdles to take in gaining user acceptance is therefore convincing users that this software cannot be compared to a spreadsheet program, it’s a completely different kettle of fish.

However the apparent weak areas of project management systems are in fact their biggest strengths:

  • as all users work in one database, there is no time delay in sharing information and this information is always up-to-date. This addresses the challenge described by attendees of training courses of finding the latest figures and knowing if those figures are still correct when spreadsheets sit on local hard drives or in different server folders.
  • because integrated project management systems have to produce forms and reports that meet auditing standards, these reports are tamper-proof documents ready and secure to be sent out to clients or suppliers. (On the job reporting side there are usually simple ways to get data out into spreadsheet readable formats that can then be processed further.)
  • as data has to be entered into the project management software rather than automatically linked into it from external files, there is an extra level of data verification.
  • From an auditing point of view the lack of backdoors into the database using other applications than the integrated software increases the data security for the company
  • Because calculations are part of the program, there is no danger of user mistakes. (On several occasions, when as part of training courses budgets or invoices were entered into a project management system to mirror information hitherto generated and held in a spreadsheet, totals didn’t agree and the first suspect was of course the new software. Only when using a calculator double-checking the information it turned out to be right and the original documents or xls files had faulty formulas or broken links, which nobody had noticed before.)

The biggest advantage is of course that there is no further step required to get data into a financial system if an integrated project management software is used.

So the the title should not really be “Project Management Software or Excel”, but instead it should be “Project Management Software for Project Management purposes and Excel for Spreadsheet purposes”, where each is best in.

Volker Bendel is manager of the training department of Agency Software Worldwide, the producers of the “Paprika/Rebus” job costing software (http://www.paprika-software.com) and (http://www.rebus-software.com). Originally from a legal background, he has several years experience in planning and implementing Job Costing and Accounting Software Systems in the Creative Industry. He has also delivered training courses in the UK, Europe, Dubai, the US, China and Australia. Prior to that he worked as a senior business consultant in Hong Kong and as a department manager of a design department in Hong Kong.

Share this article:
  • StumbleUpon
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Technorati
  • Reddit
  • YahooMyWeb
  • blogmarks

Related Articles

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 and is filed under Computer Based Information Systems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 people have left comments

Thank you for bring to the fore a very real question that many face in their organizations. We have found Excel to be just the light-weight tool when activities in a project are quite linear with not very complicated precedence/concurrency relationships. And there are other situations where you could actually be switching from one to the other depending on the phase of the project!

I plan to write about our experiences on the same question in my blog (tskraghu.wordpress.com) sometime soon.

Raghunathan K wrote on July 4, 2008 - 12:11 am | Visit Link

Excel is a great tool, but it does not support collaboration. Period. Project management is about collaboration, that’s wny you simply can’t do without tools like Wrike or Basecamp. You only need to choose what type of project management is for you: lite with no Gantts and due dates, or with timelines, reports, dependencies and other real project management features.

David Grisham wrote on July 7, 2008 - 3:50 am | Visit Link

feel free to leave a comment

Comment Guidelines: Basic XHTML is allowed (a href, strong, em, code). All line breaks and paragraphs are automatically generated. Off-topic or inappropriate comments will be edited or deleted. Email addresses will never be published. Keep it PG-13 people!

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>

All fields marked with " * " are required.

Project Management Categories