The Most Expensive PPM Tool You Didn’t Buy Steve Chamberlin
(June 11, 2007)
The proliferation of spreadsheets for project portfolio management is an indication that complex offerings are too hard to use. But the drawbacks to PPM-by-spreadsheet are significant, and there are affordable solutions that make adoption easy, which is the best way to actually realize the benefits of PPM.
Spreadsheets are everywhere. Microsoft estimates there are 450 million users of Excel worldwide. And it is no wonder — the spreadsheet is a very handy tool. People use them for many purposes, from simple lists and tables to advanced calculations and graphs. They can be a great productivity-enhancing tool and offer many advantages including:
Ease of Use – Most people already know how to create spreadsheets or could learn very quickly
Availability – Spreadsheet applications are on almost every laptop and PC, just a click away. As a result, they have become a standard form of communication between computer users.
Flexibility – Spreadsheets allow even non-technical people to do things they never thought possible without learning a programming language
Inexpensive Start-Up – Because spreadsheets are typically already installed on most laptops and PCs, and creating a spreadsheet can be very fast and easy, they have very low start-up costs.
For these reasons, spreadsheets are the project tracking and project portfolio management (PPM) tool of choice for many organizations — both large and small.
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