Spreadsheet are opportunities

Last Update: 23.05.2018. By Jens in Developers Life | Learning | Newsletter

Strangely, I am a bit obsessed with spreadsheet usage recently. They have their place and time to be used. And they can be a bad solution, becoming a maintenance nightmare. I believe those situations are a good opportunity for generating new business. Or starting out with your own.

A friend told me last week, they are going to partly automate a process which is done by much manual labor and the help of spreadsheets. In an essential billing process for one of their systems. Every month, the guy collected all required data from various systems, stored them in his spreadsheet and even added calculations in it with customer-specific rules.

Pretty error prone.

One little mistake and the billing is wrong.

With the risk of this happening each month.

Hooray!

Good that I don’t know as a customer how a provider does its billing internally. But these solutions are a risk. And depending on the type of problem they solve, they can be a big risk. Like, what reader A, who wants to stay anonymous too, send in. He worked for a manufacturing business and they run an entire production plant on a few essential spreadsheets and, gasp, an Access database…

One little error in the shift scheduling and some workers might not show up. Maybe even production delayed and thus delivered to a happy customer.

As a dev, it is a perfect opportunity to think about the risks involved and alternative solutions and pitch that to your bosses or clients. Solely on risk and what money they could save due to better risk mitigation.

As an exercise, just pick the last spreadsheet usage where you banged your head on the table and do a risk assessment. For yourself, as training.

And as a bonus, think about how you could pitch it.