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Comment by koz1000 | Hacker News Reader

Sooner or later, all project management ends up in Excel. Doesn't matter what ticket or tracking tool you've paid for.

My experience has been that it always ends up in Google Docs. Collaboration in Docs is just so stupidly easy compared to emailing spreadsheets around. And yeah I've been through several cycles of this:

    start tracking in google docs, we'll get a system eventually. 
    -> OK we have bought a new PM system, let's start using it. 
    -> Everyone please start using the new system. Move your google docs there today. 
    -> I ... why is this still in Google Docs?
    -> Ok we've paid a bunch more money to get all of the requested features in our new system. Please please please start using it
    -> Sigh. Just share me on the Google Doc.

Purpose-built software systems allow you to ask a lot of important questions, but they don't allow you to ask all of the important questions. It's useful to have a tool that you can fall back on that gives you a basic representation of the data that you can manipulate with simple tools. For most people that will be a spreadsheet. You can also do it with *nix tools but they're really unapproachable for the uninitiated.

This is by no means observed in my experiences. It's certainly understandable how it could get there and what excel could do, but if that was a trend, its one thats faded.

Yes, it goes from Excel to Microsoft Project to the plotter to the wall. And then beings the multi-year process of watching the baseline and targets drift away from each other like ships at sea...

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