- So you may be wondering,
"Why even use Excel for project management?"
Well, let's consider a few scenarios.
Let's say you're a consultant,
and you were hired by a small business.
You're talking to the CMO and you find out
they have dozens of projects going on,
and you're wondering to yourself,
"How do we know that these projects are successful?"
The CEO points to the top-line revenue as justification,
and he says, "Look how effective these campaigns have been."
But you look at it and you think,
"Hmm, I don't know,
but they're a small business
and they're not very organized."
Let's consider another example.
You're a government employee.
This used to be me.
I was an auditor for the Air Force,
and when I was an auditor,
there was an enterprise resource planner,
so we call it an ERP system, that we all used.
The thing is, that was implemented for us to avoid Excel.
Now, the thing about this ERP system,
it was great for pulling the data out,
but if we had to generate a monthly report,
it always ended up in Excel.
So there was always a final last mile spreadsheet
that we needed to organize projects.
And what we found out was, we needed this spreadsheet
because the ERP system couldn't really do what we wanted.
Now, let's consider another example.
You work at a Fortune 500 company.
You're an analyst.
Your team is disorganized.
You guys do great work.
Your manager doesn't care that you're disorganized,
but her manager cares.
So how are you going to keep everyone happy?
What's a great way to stay organized
without implementing a massive system?
So what do all of these scenarios have in common?
The answer is that Excel is a great place
to solve the problem.
Excel gives you immediate results.
And what we're trying to do in terms of project management
is not a good fit for the tools
that our company has in place already.
The ERP system might be too big,
or the problem we're trying to solve
might be too complicated for another tool.
We might have to call up a developer and ask them for help
to implement it.
So Excel, because of its flexibility,
is the perfect fit for the job.
And finally, visuals are important for decision-making.
Again, when you use an ERP system,
you are stuck using the visuals
that they have designed for you.
But in Excel, you have a lot of variety and ability
to visualize a lot of different data
across different projects.
Now that we know Excel is the perfect tool
for project management, in the next video,
let's talk about how to keep our data organized.