Collaboration scenario: planning the budget

Earlier, we discussed a scenario for offline spreadsheet collaboration. In this post, I will explore a very similar process: budget planning, and how it can be made easier by offline spreadsheet collaboration.

Today, budget planning in some companies is performed in the following manner:

  1. The company secretary distributes an Excel budget template to the department heads.
  2. Each department head fills in his budget requirements for the upcoming year and sends it back to the secretary.
  3. Secretary combines the departmental budget sheets and creates a draft of the yearly budget for the company. The draft is then used in discussions about the budget.

This can be transformed into a very streamlined spreadsheet collaboration scenario:

  1. Secretary logs in to a collaboration-enabled, Web-enabled budget planning spreadsheet (CEWEBPS).
  2. Secretary updates list of department heads and activates CEWEBPS.
  3. CEWEBPS sends an e-mail to each department head requesting him to log on to CEWEBPS and fill in the budget required for his department.
  4. CEWEBPS nags those department heads who do not comply with the original e-mail and keeps reminding them (gently but firmly) of their obligations until they fill in their budget requirements.
  5. CEWEBPS sends daily updates to the secretary.

Besides demonstrating another way in which offline spreadsheet collaboration can be utilized in the corporation, this collaboration process introduces a couple of new requirements from the collaboration-enabled spreadsheet: access control and the possibility of in-house installation.

In this scenario, the information (i.e., the budget) is extremely sensitive. It should not be exposed to people outside the company under any circumstances, and even inside the company it should be shared on a need-to-know basis. Thus, to support spreadsheet collaboration offline, a product must support access control and be installed on the company’s infrastructure.

Posted on October 3, 2006 by Yoav Ezer 
Filed Under Collaboration

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