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I was on a virtual call recently with an organisation, just live on a new comprehensive integrated housing solution.
It was a project that I worked together with them after procurement as a Critical Friend. It had been a great project, although one that had to be elongated, due to Covid, extreme weather/flooding and some other challenges. The ALMO and a combination of very capable project managers, took all of this in their stride, bringing everything in to time and budget.
I have worked on lots of procurements and a good number I work with during the implementation, to ensure we get the most from the supplier and the project is delivered to expectations set earlier. I know other consultants who help procure and stop there. I am always sensitive to answering the question, “Could I bring this in for that budget and pretty much to that suggested timescale”? This is clearly not a concern for many others. A lot of my clients become my long term friends and its important to me to see the organisation get the solution they procured and the absolute best chance for residents to feel the benefits of it.
So, we have a nice shiny system, however there is an elephant in the room, in tabular form.
Yes my friends, I am talking about spreadsheets, these days its Excel (which has conclusively clobbered Lotus-1-2-3, Visicalc and SuperCalc on the whole). Now don’t get me wrong, I am not Spreadsheet-ist. I like them, but only used for the things that they are best at. Spreadsheets are NOT good at being a database. Excel is NOT a database!
The challenge for this organisation (like many others), is to discover out where spreadsheets are actively in use, then seek out why staff are updating them. It’s a given I guess that all organisations will have multiple copies of historic spreadsheets, that are static and if identified can be easily made read-only or archived automatically.
Asking users to ‘fess-up’ to updating and maintaining spreadsheets, can lead to limited engagement. Users may often hang on to updating spreadsheets, as they perceive it as ‘part of their job’. If eliminated, would that eliminate their job? Probably not, they would most likely do an alternative task, adding more value or being more fulfilling to them.
The windows or SharePoint file system can be used to identify active spreadsheets. Connection tools in Crystal Reports, Qlik and other tools, allow access to spreadsheet properties, creator/amend user etc, which can be the entry point to what spreadsheets are actively in use, week to week, month to month.
In my experience, a lot of the use of spreadsheets is historic. They were completed because a certain manager/director wanted them maintained, or the old system didn’t store that data. In some cases, they are maintained because managers did not ‘trust’ the primary system of record.
Once identified, ICT or business analyst staff need to work out what value is added from the spreadsheet. Also if any data recorded in spreadsheets now belongs in the new solution and put a plan together to move the data to the primary system of record. The change required will modify processes and staff jobs, hopefully cutting out waste and gravitating towards more of a single source of the truth from the new primary system of record.
The attitude towards spreadsheets and their proliferation needs to be bullish. Failure to do so will get in the way of using any new system well and a bullet that needs to be bit!
Related Post: So Serco and the NHS are not safe to use Excel like a database now?
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David Byrne - Gasoline And Dirty Sheets.
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009
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