“We're not getting replies on time.” “Then let's create a progress tracker.” By the following week, an Excel spreadsheet is ready, complete with color coding and data validation. But the replies still don't come. The person chasing them now has another task: entering the date they sent each reminder.
To find out whether a tracker helped, look beyond the finished spreadsheet to the work that followed. Is it clearer who needs to act next? Is less time spent waiting for decisions? And once you include the time spent updating the tracker, is the workload actually lighter?
If you've been asked to improve a process, or work somewhere that keeps adding trackers, here are some things to check before building one, while using it, and when its job is done.
Start with one case and trace where it stalled
Suppose a piece of work cannot begin because a business partner hasn't replied to a question about the specifications. Saying “communication is slow” doesn't tell you much about what to do next. Take just that one case and trace it from the initial request to the point where it stalled.
- Did the request reach the other party?
- Did they have all the information they needed to answer?
- Whose decision was everyone waiting for?
- Had someone been assigned to make the next contact, with a date for doing so?
If no one knew who was handling the case, and two people were chasing the same contact, a shared tracker could help. Sharing the person responsible, the response still needed, and the next action can reduce duplicated effort and missed follow-ups.
Now suppose the business partner was actually waiting for your company to finalize the specifications. If no one has been assigned to make that decision, entering “awaiting reply” every morning won't make a decision-maker sprout from a cell. First, you need to establish who will decide the specifications, by when, and whom to consult if they cannot decide.
Don't assume that one case explains every delay. Check whether similar cases are getting stuck at the same point. A tracker can be a useful tool for doing that.
Before adding a column, ask: “What decision will this information support?”
There's no end to the fields that sound useful: percentage complete, owner comments, reasons for delay, action status, reviewer. Each one also adds work for the person entering the data.
For every column, ask: “Who will look at this, and what will they change because of it?”
For example, “next contact date” tells the person responsible when to follow up. “Overdue” helps a manager adjust priorities. If those decisions never happen and everyone simply looks at the red cells each week, you need to agree on how to act on the information before worrying about the colors.
You can start with fields you will actually use, such as the case, the person responsible, the reason it is stalled, the next action, and the review date. What you need will depend on the work, though. Some records must be kept for quality checks or audits. Before deleting a field just because its purpose isn't immediately obvious, check with the departments that need it and confirm the retention requirements.
If people must copy information from another system, be clear about whose checks this makes easier, and how. Consider a hypothetical example: ten people each spend five minutes a day copying data so that the person overseeing the work can save five minutes a day. You may simply have moved the workload elsewhere.
Compare what changes after people use it, rather than stopping at “finished”
Before introducing the tracker, write one sentence describing what it is meant to improve. Something like “Reduce the time spent finding who owns cases awaiting a reply, and cut duplicate reminders” is enough.
Then try it for, say, two weeks and look at the following changes. Two weeks is just an example; adjust the trial to fit how long the work takes to move through the process.
- Time spent finding the person responsible or asking for a status update
- Duplicate status requests or reminders sent about the same case
- Cases that are past their deadline but still have no agreed next action
- Time spent entering, correcting, and reviewing information in the tracker
In another hypothetical example, the team used to spend two hours a week checking status. After introducing the tracker, it spends one hour checking status and an hour and a half updating the spreadsheet. Together, those two tasks now take thirty minutes more than before. But if the tracker also brings important cases to light that used to be overlooked, that benefit deserves a separate assessment. Time alone cannot tell you about quality or the prevention of incidents.
If precise measurement is difficult, start by counting status checks for comparable cases or keeping brief notes about situations where the people doing the work ran into trouble. Don't directly compare weeks with different numbers or levels of difficulty of cases. Note what you still don't know, too. The aim is to distinguish the fact that you built a tracker from evidence that it improved the work.
Connect meetings and one-to-ones to what happens next
Some bottlenecks cannot be resolved with a spreadsheet alone. A decision involving several departments may need a meeting. A problem someone finds difficult to raise may only come to light in a one-to-one.
Turn what you learn into a next action. After a meeting, make sure the decision, the person who will carry it out, and the review date are clear. If you discover that approvals are slow, agree on whom to consult when the approver is away. If a one-to-one reveals an uneven workload, discuss changes to responsibilities or deadlines with the person concerned, then check later whether their workload has changed.
There is no need to judge every one-to-one solely by measurable results. But if the same problem comes up repeatedly and nothing reaches someone who can change the situation, review how concerns are acted on before adding more meetings. For personal matters, check what the person wants and what genuinely needs to be shared. Don't simply copy those details into a progress tracker.
Set a date to scale back even a useful tracker
Sometimes the reason for a tracker disappears, but the requests to update it remain. Responsibilities and communication routes are clear, and information arrives automatically, yet the old manual entries and recurring meetings continue.
Setting a review date at the start of the trial makes it easier to avoid keeping a tracker just because you feel bad for the person who built it. While preserving the records you need, consider reducing daily entries to weekly ones, collecting routine case information automatically and checking only exceptions, or no longer reading out every case in a meeting.
When raising this at work, try asking “Which decision do we use this column for?”, “Could we try this for two weeks and compare both the time spent checking and the time spent updating?”, or “Once things settle down, which entries could we reduce?” Those questions make for a more concrete discussion than “This spreadsheet is a waste of time.”
Did your Excel tracker reduce the work? The answer lies less in how polished the file looks than in what changes after people use it. Fewer back-and-forth status checks. Decisions that were stuck finally moving forward. An end to unnecessary copying, while the records that matter are still kept.
After asking “What did we build?”, go one step further: “What do we no longer have to do?” A tracker you only need to open when it matters may be working much harder than one with a beautiful color scheme.
