Every project has a certain amount of flexibility in it. Different people have their own personal preferences, different projects have different needs, etc. So certain parts of the process get reinvented by every single team, but there's nothing wrong with that.
But the doomed project is such a mess that we've had to reinvent the process itself from scratch, and it has been, obviously, a mess. In particular, there are two different Microsoft Excel spreadsheets we've used. They're keeping track of the same kind of data - input on the document from at least some of the same people - for use by the same team members, in the same ways. And yet the two spreadsheets have different colors in them, for a while they had different numbers of colors in them, the colors mean different things, they have different numbers of columns.
That's partly my mistake: I should have been better prepared, because it's not like being asked to make them was a surprise. I should have sat down and thought, maybe asked for help or looked for other examples, and come up with one layout that would work fine for both of them. And it's partly me just being adaptable: the first one worked less than perfectly, so I made changes in hopes of improving it. Good for me.
Partly, though, it's because the spreadsheets need to be used by different people in different ways. Personally, I'm not an Excel guru. When I saw the economist use the formula tool in it in a certain way a few weeks ago, I marveled at the elegance of what he had done, and I'm still picking up minor tricks with it that I wouldn't have known a year ago. But still, I'm capable of copying and pasting things, and if coloring a cell or row is a useful way to store information then I can handle that and keep it straight just fine. So I do.
Some people, though, clearly either aren't capable of that much attention to detail and command of Excel, or just don't care. One of the changes I made to the spreadsheet in the second version was dropping a color. In the first version, one problem was that people would make cells the wrong color. Maybe they misunderstood what the colors meant, maybe they just added a new row and Excel automatically gave it the color of the neighboring row and they didn't think about that. Either way, too many colors was apparently a confusing variable that I thought we could do without on the second spreadsheet, so I tried to keep it to just two. I feel pretty justified about that because even with two colors some people still made cells the wrong color, but I don't think I can simplify it much more than this.
But in the first meeting using it, we got stuck on how to show a certain change in status. Someone suggested turning it yellow. I didn't have a better alternative in mind right away (wish I'd thought of something better on the spot, but I didn't), so that's what we went with. Unfortunately though, it doesn't quite match the meaning that yellow had in the previous spreadsheet. So now we have three colors again.
This is a specific instance of a common general problem: in any given instance, better planning could have made things better. But considering how much we're making things up as we go, anticipating everything would be impossible.
No comments:
Post a Comment