Is Excel a good idea for managing projects?

Excel is an excellent spreadsheet, and a considerably less capable project manager — particularly on complex projects. Unsurprisingly, that brings a number of problems with it.

The limits of Excel for project management

The feeling of being swamped

A complete Excel sheet for managing projects very quickly becomes unreadable. The trouble with that kind of sheet is that it is all too easy to feel overwhelmed, and to give up.

Getting lost among all the information

How do you find your bearings? How do you see, at a glance, the information that matters to you? How do you get a different view of one and the same project without rebuilding it? As a project manager, it matters that your colleagues can find their way around a project easily.

How hard it is to stay flexible

Flexibility is a key point in project management. An Excel sheet offers very little of it, and can even make some things impossible.

No easy way to collaborate

Managing a project without giving your colleagues an overall view of the strategy and the actions is a hard thing to do. Bringing a project home calls for a collaborative tool.

Poor project management has plenty of causes and plenty of consequences. The sense of being overwhelmed and of never finishing anything is a large part of it, and it can create no end of trouble inside an organisation.

How, and why, to replace Excel?

A good many people worked out some time ago that project management needed proper software of its own. Klaro is one answer, mixing the adaptability Excel gives you — imposing no particular way of working — with the flexibility, the performance and the support a collaborative tool can offer. To understand a little better why Klaro exists and how its approach differs from other software, you can read "Klaro in five questions & answers".

What good project management changes

SaaS project-management tools are many and varied. You can easily find one that suits you, and take up an entirely different way of managing thanks to capable tools. Bringing a new tool into an organisation can look like a considerable change, but with support and guidance it becomes a far more supple and motivating thing. Good project management brings a number of advantages:

• time saved, because you concentrate on what matters;
• more trust between colleagues, thanks to a clear and complete view of the project;
• growing productivity and motivation;
• more autonomy for everyone — it matters that every member of a project knows precisely what they have to do, and when.