What are the digital office tools that you are using in your management of projects?
Spreadsheets, emails and most likely you have added Whatsapp to your arsenal of project management control.
In today’s digital era, we are facing a deluge of information from clients request, design changes, internal issues that need our immediate attention and others which always depend on our memory to retrieve the right information. Further, all of these are required to be digested, analysed and inputted into a spreadsheet for report purposes.
The truth is spreadsheets are not the most effective method to manage projects, especially the large and complex ones. Planning work in spreadsheets can be time-consuming, unreliable and ineffective.
Below are the 3 reasons gathered from professionals:
1.Tedious information gathering
There’s a great amount of fear to update project spreadsheets as the exercise of chasing for the right information to be updated can be outright long and difficult. Spreadsheets don’t track the changes of the information and processes over time. This can become a big problem, especially when you need the right data to make informed decisions on how to move your project smoothly.
2.Multiple versions
People will tend to dump all of their information in multiple versions of spreadsheets and expect the project manager to update the data into meaningful reports for management. You have probably experienced receiving multiple emails or accessing files from your team members updating different versions of the same document.
Relying solely on spreadsheets for project management will reduce your chances to effectively collaborate on project information.
3.Non-accurate information
There is no clear tracking of the data accuracy and everybody will scramble to put into a common shared folder to meet the deadline for the report. When the project manager stress levels are up to the neck and leaves the project. The outcome will be that many of those spreadsheets will be left untouched on a network drive and project information will eventually become more chaotic to interpret and manage.
To be truly effective and productive, project schedules and information need to be available to a wide range of users and there must be an automated real time update process. Also, there must be a clear assignment of duties to ensure that the right person updates the information without that pesky Whatsapp reminder.
You can easily solve this with Synttro’s solution. Everything Starts Here!
Please call our helpful professional consultants for a free demo.