Managing information is common problem area. Sometimes people need to manipulate data in ways that corporate systems just aren’t designed to handle – merging information from different sources, reorganizing it, performing calculations that an enterprise system can’t handle. And the tool that everybody seems to turn to in those situations is Excel. Even when the data is not numbers, but text, Excel is the application of choice. This often ends up making it difficult to share the information, making it accessible for other people or to other business processes.
Let me give an example of how Excel might be used in a workaround:
Jane is a project manager for a product development team. The team has a web-based system that allows them to enter bugs and resolution status, and theoretically this is the official record. However, when Jane holds the twice-weekly team meetings, she downloads all of the bug records and organizes them into an Excel spreadsheet. In the team meeting, she enters status updates and interim issues into her spreadsheet. These never make it back into the web system - the Excel records are her official source of information for project updates.
Jane has her reasons for not keeping all the information in the web system – it’s time-consuming to enter data, the fields are restrictive, searching is complicated, she can’t import information easily....and so on. Excel meets all of her own needs, and enables her to better track bug status and provide reports to her management. The related costs to her – having to download the data, responding to other people who do want the data she keeps in Excel – are low compared to the benefits she gains. Jane’s not going to say that this workaround is a problem - she’s happy, her team’s happy, her management is happy – what’s the problem?
Well, the problem is that the information kept so carefully in those Excel spreadsheets isn’t easily available to others who are outside of that immediate chain. When her colleague Marcus, working on a team doing related product development, runs into a similar bug – he’s not going to be able to easily find out how Jane’s team resolved it. Especially if it’s 6 months later and Jane’s moved on to a new project. There’s a lot of hidden, wasted effort in these kinds of situations, where people have to reinvent the wheel. But you don’t often learn about them unless you really dig into what it’s like being the person doing the job, because Jane and everyone else takes the workarounds for granted.
Once we discover these problem areas, then we can begin developing approaches to help people become more efficient. Sometimes that means changing the technology, sometimes the work practices, sometimes both together – it depends on needs and resources. I’ll talk about both ends of this process - the discovery and the fixing - later!
