SMEs & start-ups

Start-up companies and small business owners have limited resources so tend to focus effort on developing the business and generating sales. Admin and other areas sometimes suffer - particularly processes like data capture and performance management/ measurement, which are simply not on their radar: if it is being captured, it tends to be haphazard and spread across systems, mainly multiple Microsoft Excel spread sheets.

Excel is a versatile, powerful application, and can be adapted to meet even the most demanding of business requirements – but this requires some VBA programming knowledge – something most small business owners don’t have. If they did have the skills, then many of the issues that arise from using Excel to capture business data would be overcome (i.e. duplicate records, inconsistencies in formatting, badly structured spread sheets and so on).

Excel does have some data validation tools, but most of these can be over-ridden (copy and paste can be enough to achieve this - particularly in older versions of Excel). The only real way is to hard code rules and conditions into the workbooks, but as mentioned earlier, this requires some programming skill.

Large organisations

Many larger organisations also rely heavily on Microsoft Excel for capturing and analysing data: despite having all the latest technologies including business intelligence and reporting applications, many still use MS Excel for the bulk of their work. The worse culprits (we found) were in fact government departments and some financial institutions. These types of organisations tend to throw money at a problem hoping it will solve it (i.e. investing in the latest technologies). What they don't realise is, this can actually make it worse: they need to address the cause, but the problem is - very few can see what that is because it's deeply buried from years of 'patching over the cracks'.

Example scenario

A case in point (and this is a true story) is a large public sector organisation. They had a team of Analysts that were responsible for producing regular and ad-hoc reports for senior management and the board. The team were very hard working, but faced a daily battle to meet ever increasing deadlines. Even with lots of overtime, and an additional team of contract workers, they still struggled with the work-load.

They had all the latest equipment, technology and software (including business intelligence applications). All the Analysts had received training in these applications, yet never actually used them, continuing instead to use Excel.

The reason for this was twofold: they were never given time after training to cut their teeth on ‘real work’ using these applications: deadlines had to be met, and to meet these, the quickest way was to do as they always did. It was a case of ‘use it or lose it’.

Secondly, they felt the applications were simply too advanced - none of the Analysts in this particular team were actually trained Analysts (coming from totally unrelated backgrounds like catering) had no IT qualifications to speak of, or any real idea of how to structure data let alone query and analyse it.

They produced all management reports using Excel pivot tables, some basic calculations and a lot of copying and pasting. They relied heavily on step-by-step guides (literally hundreds) to walk them through tasks. These were originally created by an inexperienced Analyst when the team was first setup, who had little knowledge of Excel, who basically took what should have been a simple task and turned it into a long-winded set of processes.

As the team grew, so did the problem: new members were taught the same bad habits and inefficient methods for producing the work. Tasks that should take seconds (through automation) actually took hours, so they ended up with a team of approximately 10 staff doing the work that (if done in the correct way) would require at most two or three.

In this particular case, the cause comes down to a lack of vision and poor decision making when the team was first set-up i.e. hiring unskilled staff (possibly to save money) which ended up costing a fortune!

I wonder how many other organisations out there can relate to this …