Throughout my experience as Project Manager and Program Manager, I have seen small, medium, large and worldwide companies supporting some of their most important business processes on Excel. Yes. They all use EXCEL. Very big companies of logistics, manufacturing, software development, field service mgmt, warehouse mgmt, services, BI, ... rely on Excel. Not only use it, as that would be normal, but relying and supporting their most important business operations on Excel. Our Microsoft Office, green, .xmls friend, is what makes this world turn around!
I've participated in at least 10 projects for transforming companies to have end-to-end business management capabilities out of Excel and moved to an ERP (in the cloud, or on-premise or hybrid). Still, I love Excel and it is a great tool to use, but again, as a tool, not an ERP. And so, as a tool, Project Managers should be able to use it... regularly, with fair knowledge, to help organize data sets and project activities. Why? Because Excel is not only for "doing numbers", but also for project management. For example, Excel can help us calculate capacity and demand management, optimization models, key metrics, simulations, and other operation analytics; along with, people analytics like mapping collaboration networks, and customer (internal or external) analytics like doing active surveys (data collections). We can even make graphs and charts, templates, forms, and a lot more.
Next time you use Excel, pad yourself in the back, as you also are an Excel-lent Project Manager!
(The picture is an Optimization Model using Solver macro, under Data. Very useful for operations management)
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