Although managing a RAID in a spreadsheet is quick, portable and easy for individual project managers, it starts to become problematic when trying to aggregate data across all those RAID logs for a program or portfolio view. Aggregation can require manual copy/paste of critical RAID items, which is not at all practical. In case you are thinking of having everyone just work out of one massive RAID log spreadsheet, I can hopefully save you a lot of pain by recommending you never do that.
At some point in the growth of your organization, it will become too cumbersome to aggregate data from all your spreadsheet based RAID logs. This is when it may make sense to invest in a dedicated software product to do the job. There are Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) tools purpose-built for centralized project management and reporting. However, these tools generally do a poor job of RAID management, and are cost prohibitive for most organizations. In a pinch you can try task-based Work Management tools like Asana, Trello or Clickup. Having spent way too many hours of my life trying to get these tools to do the trick, I’ve found these miss the mark as well and aren’t worth the hassle.
This is why the author of this book got together with some of his colleagues and started developing what they hope will be the ultimate RAID log solution: RAIDLOG.com. If your spreadsheet is working for you, then I cheer that. But, if you are looking for something more, I invite you to check out what we’ve put together at https://raidlog.com.
