Say goodbye to spreadsheets. You deserve better. Being dependent on spreadsheets for project management is leading to avoidable inefficiencies. You can only track so much in spreadsheets, so if you want a clear view of project progress, you need more than a static spreadsheet.
Why you can’t manage fiber projects in spreadsheets
Consumers on their smartphones, tablets, and other connected devices want high speeds and low latency from their wireless network. The world is seeing a greater demand for throughput and connectivity. To meet this demand, carriers and service providers are building more fiber. Fiber is the backbone of the wireless infrastructure of the future. It is one of the largest types of ongoing high volume projects.
Installing fiber anywhere requires a number of critical steps:
- Surveying the route
- Inspecting the terrain
- Documenting the process
- Trenching, which requires breaking concrete, cutting asphalt, and crossing bridges
- Annotating PDFs
- Marking the route
- Laying fiber
- Filling the trench
The connection point, fiber hubs, and nodes must be continually tested and maintained through a verification process. Documenting all of this in a spreadsheet is time-consuming and nearly impossible. Spreadsheets don’t have maps to visualize current and proposed routes. Surveying documents cannot be annotated and attached to a spreadsheet. The pain of spreadsheets harms your organization both in the field and in the office.
Spreadsheets undermine collaboration
Collaboration is a cornerstone of project management. Spreadsheets don’t allow members of your organization to collaborate in real time or easily share documents. A proper project management platform allows people to collaborate in real time and makes it easy to update projects.
Lacking an audit history
Spreadsheets lack basic audit logs, causing confusion about who updated or deleted what. A proper project management solution provides a transparent audit log showing who makes changes and when. Without an audit history, there is potential for human error to go undetected, making it much harder to fix later. Deleting a cell instead of a row can shift things around and cascade erroneous updates throughout the worksheet, as can accidentally updating the wrong cell or using the wrong formula.
Presence of conflicting versions
Instead of having all the data in one central location, having different versions of a spreadsheet spread out across different users and teams can cause changes made by one person to not be received by the others. This makes collaboration difficult and changes can easily be lost in translation from email to email. A proper project management solution provides a central platform where collaboration is easy and everyone is aware of changes.
Proper project management solution
Managers of key fiber projects and leaders in the telecom and utility industries already benefit from Sitetracker as their project management solution. Wave goodbye to spreadsheets. Book a demo with our project management experts to see how Sitetracker can modernize your project and asset management.
