Why spreadsheets don’t cut it

Back in 1996 I was heavily involved in the New Southern Railway (now called the Airport link) working with (what was then) Rail Services. We undertook a series of workshops to assist with our tender submission. The data was held on spread sheets as in those days there were no other tools available. Over the course of the project’s 2.5 years the management of risks was a significant undertaking largely because spread sheets were time consuming to maintain, cumbersome to use (particularly in workshops) and needed substantial re-work to get useful data from them. In short they were very inefficient.

This experience demonstrated that a spread sheet was not the right tool to manage risk and precipitated the development of RiskOrganizer. If you are using spread sheets (or Word documents) then the good news is that at least risk management is occurring. Moving to a database should not be a particularly onerous step and will significantly improve ongoing risk management. If you would like more detail then please go to our link Selecting a Toolset.