Re:How Project Management tools kill more companies than any...
by mathattack on Monday April 14, 2014 @01:19PM
(#7587475)
Yes - that's my point. An imperfect tool used by a team that's universally following a "good enough" process is much better than striving for perfection in either the tool or the process.
I've spent time in organizations that strive for perfection in either the project management tool ("Well, let's just tweak the Access database some more.") or the process ("We need to report on 50 metrics daily.") and wind up much worse for wear.
I haven't found the cell limit size to be a problem. Perhaps because I don't use Excel as a substitute for requirements document. I just it to keep track of things, and a couple lines is usually enough.
My experience is that it usually seems at first to be enough, and then at some point you have too much information that needs to go in one cell, and then cell-size limits bite you...
It may be that there are lots of bad project management tools out there and a simple Excel spreadsheet is better than many of those, but its still not a good tool for the use.
OTOH, I would agree that that the real meat of project management is "the actual discipline of discussing them, saying 'No' to lots of things, telling people when you're waiting on things for them, and focusing on the tasks at hand" and that often too much focus is on tools.