I read with some pain, but also a chuckle or two, CFO on-line’s sloppy spreadsheet practices article. I like to be organized, send files with naming conventions (source, date, and revision numbers), and like to assist the user of my excel files by using borders, bolded titles, and generally making them readable and printable. Amazingly, according to the article, most students and employees seem to simply send very poor looking documents that at first are unprintable. It’s simply work-creating laziness!

This creates an amazing amount of waste especially if you send your files to two or more people who have to fix your mess.

So here are four things everybody should do to help the world handle your spreadsheets:

1. Title your columns

2. Bold and italicize where necessary to make them easier to read

3. Wrap text (in comment fields in particular)

4. Make them printable

Apparently you will be one of the few who do these simple things and will probably be loved for it. Who knows, it could lead to a promotion.

Do you have any pet peaves related to spreadsheets? Share them! Are you a lazy spreadsheet user? REPENT!

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Very interesting issue popped up the other day as I was speaking with a food manufacturer. They are very high quality and taste is everything. They therefore cringe when talk of continual improvement comes along because they do NOT want to mess with the process of food preparation even though they are a manufacturer and not a restaurant. Efficiency, as it relates to continual improvement, can lead to what they call recipe “drift”. In other words, many companies have started small with taste and quality of their food as the key differentiator, only to inexplicably lose that taste edge as they became “efficient” in their manufacturing. This is a great example because everyone understands what happens when your mom’s great recipe is passed onto the next generation the first time.

This got me thinking about other manufacturing processes, of very high quality, that might be subject to inexplicable “drift”. Over-engineering is generally a problem of not listening to the customer. The other thought is to concentrate on waste and NOT efficiency. Waste seems to be a more palatable target for the firm that is hesitant to embrace the efficiency side of continual improvement. The other approach might be to simply separate what you apply continual improvement approaches to. In the case of a food manufacturer maybe packaging, distribution and planning processes could be targets for waste reduction. Always remembering what your customer must have to continue to do business with you reigns supreme.

Do you have a high quality manufacturing process that could be subject to “drift”? Does focusing on waste and not on efficiency help combat “drift”? Is it possible to introduce continual improvement into an organization in one area and not another?

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Becky at www.myorgnanizedbiz.com recently wrote about the value of calendaring your “biz” and your life. One thing that stuck out was her proposal to try a two week experiment that could change your life:

Becky: Try this for the next two weeks: each day, figure out the five most important things that you need to accomplish that day. Then schedule time for them on your calendar. Schedule it around meetings and e-mail and errands. Actually block out time where you concentrate on that task.

And when that time comes, work on the task. If you only have a 1/2 hour, then see how much you can get done in a 1/2 hour. Don’t answer e-mail. Don’t pick up the phone. Just stick to your calendar.

Didn’t get your task done in the allotted time? That’s okay. Did you make progress? That’s the important part.

My response to her post was to link this thinking to project management best practices, preparation, and actually doing more by doing less:

PM411: Becky- really like the “capacity planning” emphasis. Many are great at calendaring but end up going from one activity to the next being unprepared. I find that lack of preparation means a lot of what I call “stops, starts and redos” which waste a lot of time. We almost need to do less in a better way to cut down the bad multi-tasking- this is what I love to write about at http://www.projectmanagement411.com, i.e., the ways good project management practices enable efficient prioritization of projects and alignment with strategies- whether it be on a personal or business level.

How about you? Do you have examples of doing more by doing less? The Theory of Constraints (Goldratt) deals with issues like suboptimization, slowing down certain activities to actually get more done because of the alignment with rates of other processes- do you see an application for this in your office? Your Plant? Your personal life?

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