Spreadsheets is an amazing tool. It can connect a dozen tabs and solve complex equations with ease. Have you ever seen someone use a “pivot table”? Amazing. But for many organizations, they’ve adopted this tool to manage data for people. There’s simply a lack of options on the market to solve this problem and it’s free and easily accessible for their staff. However, when it comes to the management of your talent pool of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and volunteers, spreadsheets tend to cause more problems than offer solutions.
Bad Data Hygiene
The data collected about your SMEs and volunteers is an important step to assemble your committees, task force, and workgroups. The early stages of collecting this information typically starts out as either a survey, online form or simply jotting the details down on pen and paper and then taking the data collected and transferring it into a spreadsheet. It’s a lot of manual work and you would have every right to be concerned if there were errors.
Unfortunately, the manual process of collecting and entering your data manually into a spreadsheet is a process that is prone to errors. In a MarketWatch study it was discovered that 88% of spreadsheets contain errors due to the manual work that goes into creating them.
It's not just you. In 2012, officials at the London Olympics dealt with a massive spreadsheet error that led to the overselling of 10,000 tickets to an event.
People vs. Spreadsheets and Data Silos
Every organization collects different information on their SMEs and volunteers, but the spreadsheets containing that data can quickly become unmanageable. Tab after tab, your spreadsheet can become a large, dense, overwhelming document. Maybe you end up sharing your spreadsheet with your colleagues for their input, and next thing you know someone has managed to insert a new column or row, hits “save as” and in an instant there are several versions of the spreadsheet you’ve painstakingly worked on.
Stephanie Freyer says:
“It’s too easy for any contributor to insert rows or columns, change a formula or delete a field. They (spreadsheets) were never designed to have numerous authors, calculate massive amounts of data, or integrate with hundreds of other documents. If your team is planning in spreadsheets, not only will you end up duplicating work in different parts of the organization, version control issues will potentially lead to confusion about where numbers came from, who is responsible for what and even which numbers are accurate.”
Another pitfall of spreadsheets, they create the dreaded data silos. Data silos make it difficult for organizations to get a bird’s-eye view of the entire process and ensure that the appropriate information is documented. Working in spreadsheets with large amounts of data and with multiple staff members in and out of your spreadsheets makes the user documentation process cumbersome. So if something goes wrong, it's difficult to find the source or find a solution to remedy a problem.
Spreadsheets are a great tool, but people don’t belong in spreadsheets. When it comes the management of your SME and volunteer talent pool you don’t need to lose valuable time battling with the limitations of an Excel spreadsheet. That’s why we created Lineup, a volunteer management software for credentialing organizations and associations to help them automate the process of managing their talent pool of volunteers and SMEs, while also offering a collaborative space where your internal team can make real-time updates which promotes data transparency.
References
Olshan, J. (2013, April 20). 88% of spreadsheets have errors. Retrieved May 20, 2020, from MarketWatch.
Cammeron, B. (2014, November 03). Five embarrassing spreadsheet snafus. Retrieved May 20, 2020, from BBC.
Freyer, S. (2019, May 6). 4 reasons it's time to move from spreadsheets to planning software. Retrieved May 20, 2020, from IBM.