Most of the systems we replace started life as a spreadsheet. That isn’t a criticism. A spreadsheet is the fastest way for someone who knows the work to build a tool for it, and most of them do their job for years.
The trouble starts quietly. A second tab appears for last year. Then a column that only makes sense if you were in the meeting where it was added. Then a macro. Eventually one person understands it, and everyone else works around it.
Signs it’s time
- It has an owner, not users. If one person going on holiday stops the work, the spreadsheet has become a single point of failure.
- The same thing is typed twice. Copying rows into an email, a report or another system is work the software should do.
- People are emailing versions. “Final_v3_updated” means there’s no single record, and nobody is sure which one is right.
- It holds personal data. Spreadsheets are hard to secure, hard to audit and easy to send to the wrong person.
Signs it isn’t
If it’s used by one or two people, changes often, and nobody else depends on it, leave it alone. A spreadsheet that works is cheaper than any software we could build.
What we look at first
Before we suggest replacing anything, we ask the person who owns it to walk us through a normal week. The spreadsheet usually holds a good process under a lot of workarounds. Our job is to keep the process and lose the workarounds.
Trunkfield Software, Lichfield