So what. It’s reasonable. Why? We still use spreadsheets because they are simple, familiar, and we have yet to find a tool that does everything we need it to do in the way we want it. It gets frustrating. So, we turn to the familiar and to our old trusted friend: the spreadsheet.
I’ve worked at many different types of organizations, each had their own set of available or preferred tools. In some places, I was the one setting the standards. Some tools were prescribed (mandatory) and others were suggested. In every case I chose, adopted, or adapted the set of tools that best fit the type of work I was doing to the type of output expected by leadership.
Although the specific tools may have been different, the objective was fundamentally the same: to effectively manage and communicate the status of the project.
Of recent years, I’ve been working for a software-as-a-service consultancy. Delivering software in this type of business means the PM must manage the delivery team in a way that ensures the actual budget burn-down and specific project deliverables are tracking on schedule with baseline expectations defined in the statement of work.
The critical difference between consultancy work and projects internal to a company is that consultancies live and die by their ability to deliver to clients based on stipulations in legal agreements. Your company likely won’t engage attorneys if you don’t deliver your project on time or within the agreed budget. And so, creating and maintaining tight controls on project delivery is more essential for consultancies than in many other types of PM organizations.
For this reason with my current employer, we adopted a centralized tracking system as the source of truth for all project data in our delivery portfolio. The system connects human resource assignments, timesheets, task-time allocations, timelines, milestones, and all project financials (costs, revenue, expenses, margins, purchase orders, invoicing, etc.) together with the ability to report on any aspect of the delivery automatically and in real-time. But it wasn’t always that way. When the company was a baby start-up, this system had not yet been adopted and processes were far less refined. We used...you guessed it: spreadsheets.
Today in this posting I’ve attached a basic spreadsheet that I’ve developed over the years, starting from the early days when I owned a boutique consultancy and through my many consultancy-type employers. It contains tabs for a schedule-gantt, timesheets, baseline to actual budget and resource forecast, RAID, RACI, stakeholder register, change log, and communications plan. It’s not going to do everything for everyone in the way each of us wants it, but it’s a good start at capturing core information needed for consultancy PM work. I hope you can use it and adapt it for your needs.
Link to: Consulting Service Project Tracker
