The Cult of the Spreadsheet

Now spreadsheets were never intended for requirements management. In fact I believe they were intended for the management and manipulation of financial data i.e. numbers. Also they were never really designed for the purpose of datastorage and collaboration (whatever Microsoft may say about this). The scalability is just not there.

So why do certain members of analysis and management insist on using them to manage the programme (I'm tallkng 100's in some cases 1000's) requirements?? Its' just insane.

You try explaining that we have a perfectly capable database that is managed, versioned, shareable, accessible by all (with access - but we can organise that quickly), searchable, reportable in so many ways and backed up and the always come up with an excuse to have a locally stored spreadsheet that no one else can access easily. I mean this is the 21st century and everything. Strewth!

Personally I put it down to a reluctance to use anything that is not an Office product as they are quite frankly scared of change and the new. Oh did I mention its an "Agile" project. Even though we have 100's of people on it, spread all over the UK and the world and communication is not the best. Ah Well.

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