When I manage projects for Bredemarket clients using Microsoft Excel, my workbooks contain targeted worksheets that may or may not interest all the client stakeholders. I’m finally recognizing this and acting accordingly.
Whether you use Excel or something else, data filtering always benefits your stakeholder customers.
A sample Excel project management workbook
Lately I’ve fallen into the habit of organizing Bredemarket client projects in Microsoft Excel. Why? Because my stakeholders (even in Google shops with Sheets) already have the software to read the files.
Excel and many other applications organize their data in one or more tabs (worksheets). Each tab features different data, presented in different ways at the discretion of the project manager. For example, a product marketing workbook may contain these worksheet tabs:
- A summary view (Product Summary) of a product’s base offering, options, and prices.
- A more detailed view (Product Detail) of the product base / option prices and costs.
- An even more detailed view of certain supported features (Product Features) mapped to the base and options, along with detailed descriptions.
- Candidate features for product versions (Candidate Features), and their statuses.
- A view of prospects and the features they desire (Prospect Features), highlighting the desired features covered and not covered in the product.
You can see how all these worksheets could tie together. A prospect’s feature on the last tab that is approved and completed (double blind fingerprint verification) will ripple through all the other tabs. But an unapproved feature (geolocation in latitude-longitude at which a latent print was captured) would only appear on the last two tabs.
So what if recipients get more than the targeted worksheets?
Because of some things that have happened over a recent period, it finally penetrated my thick skull that just because all this data is critically important to ME to manage the project, some of it may bear no importance to OTHERS.
For example, the stakeholder that simply wants to know how much the product base and options cost doesn’t care about the features we never implemented for the Bullhead City Police Department.
At the same time, an outside developer is only interested in the features that we want to implement for the 1.3 release. Other than as background information, the developer doesn’t care which prospect(s) want the feature. And the developer doesn’t care—and perhaps shouldn’t even know (because privacy and security)—how much we price an option containing a particular feature.
Then I acted to only distribute targeted worksheets
Before all of this penetrated my thick skull, I would distribute entire workbooks and tell selected stakeholders to check the third and fourth worksheets and ignore the rest.
That’s dumb.
Why not give these selected stakeholders ONLY the targeted worksheets that are pertinent to them? More work for me to preserve the full view (all worksheet tabs) AND the targeted views, but much less work and much less confusion for the stakeholders.
I’m already doing this with one client. When it’s time to discuss features for future product releases, I’m only distributing the equivalent of the “Candidate Features” tab. This helps focus the discussion.
(I’m also filtering the rows that appear in the tab, but filtering is a topic for another discussion. And I’m also using Date of Last Update, Show/Hide, and conditional formatting as previously spoken by the wildebeest.)
In practice, and taking my 2022-developed Y2K-unfriendly document numbering system into account, I may store the following files in my client’s Microsoft or Google repository (or Bredemarket’s own):
- BlueWidget2609a-All (all tabs, not distributed to anyone but kept on file)
- BlueWidget2609a-ProductSummary (just the first tab, sent to Bob and Judy only)
- BlueWidget2609a-CandidateFeatures (just the fourth tab, sent to Judy, Chris, and Tina)
What if I’m a REAL project manager and don’t use Excel?
Now I know some project managers tuned me out when I used the E word in the title.
But the same principle applies if you use Microsoft Project, or Microsoft Teams, or Asana, or Slack, or Jira, or InsaneBambi.AI.
(Whoops, InsaneBambi.AI is still embargoed. Forget I mentioned it.)
All of these apps support views, letting you create the equivalents of targeted worksheets so certain stakeholders only see certain things about the project.
Use your favorite app’s view capability to only display information necessary for your stakeholders.
Your stakeholders are your customers. Maintain a customer focus.
But what about you?
How do you curate project views for your stakeholders? Do you send filtered spreadsheets or rely on tool-specific dashboards? Let me know in the comments.
And if you have an identity, biometric, or technology product marketing project that could benefit from Bredemarket’s expertise, let’s talk.
