Tracking information in large groups

Have you ever started with a simple spreadsheet to track some information, which grew to too many columns and then stopped being useful?

The team didn’t know what some of the columns meant, a bunch went unfilled and only used sometimes, some columns were dependent on other columns, and it was too much scrolling to see any useful information. And then you sent emails communicating which columns are must-haves and which are optional. The truth is that your needs change depending on how you’re going to use that info, so one month some data might be useful and other months, it might be a different set of columns. I’ve heard this happen in all sorts of well-designed tools like SalesForce, ServiceNow, Planview, and it also happens with spreadsheets (Excel, Google Docs, Smartsheet, etc.).

It’s not about the tool, it’s really about understanding the psychology of how people work in large groups and then being thoughtful about how to manage change and what’s really important. If you do so, you’ll show that you’re respecting people’s time and that you mean business when you ask for something. Here’s a few practical tips to keep in mind.

Things to stick to

1. Information that benefits the end-users — If you get benefit from something, you’re more willing to enter information. It could be the funding amount for your project. Or the name of the servers that’s hosting some application.
2. Information that will help others you can identify with — If you’re managing a vacation schedule, asking for contact info is something people will provide because they know if they were manning the ship, they’d want to be able to contact you in case of a emergency.
3. Information that’s clearly needed for the company — If you understand how the information is used for the benefit of the company, people will generally update it. An example could be the serial number for a piece of hardware, which might be needed when calling for a service repair. This can often be a slippery slope — because one person’s need is another’s luxury. Do you really need to know my projected spend for next year today? How good is that information likely to be?

Things to stay away from

1. Information that changes frequently and isn’t needed by everyone — Keeping something updated is an extra step, and while it may be nice to be able to look up something, be careful that people may stop updating it. Are the influencers at the client for a deal useful for everyone to know? Could someone else realistically take over the relationship by knowing this?
2. Information to capture point in time data — what I mean by this is a column that captures when something happened — such as when did the project move from requirements to design (ex. design start date)? Given the nature of time variant data, you can quickly end up with lots of columns, and again face the issue of data quality. This is where a tool like QvikList shines, where the history of what changed when is automatically available if necessary, without adding columns.
3. Information with time-based or other types of qualifiers— an example of this would be expected spend by quarter or columns for who’s playing the 6 different roles your program office has identified as key. You can end up with many columns, and it’s not clear what value you’ll get given the likely poor quality of the information you’ll end up with.

Making information available to your company and your colleagues is an incredibly powerful way to build cohesion and affinity. People knowing that they are trusted with information and that they can easily go to to find things creates a sense of confidence. If you play a role in managing a process that can do with tracking information, you have an opportunity to create something useful for everyone. Be very deliberate about what information you do decide to manage, because your success and the happiness or frustration of your teammates can be at stake.