Have you ever battled laggy Excel files while trying to manage your project’s requirements? Or opened a SharePoint folder only to find countless conflicted copies of the same requirements spreadsheet?
You’re not alone.
Projects love Excel because it’s cheap, it’s easy and just about everyone knows how to use it. It has become the go-to requirements management tool for lots of projects in various industries, and in many cases its good enough to get the job done. And sometimes, it’s simply not.
So, how do you know when your project needs a more sophisticated requirements management platform?
Here are the top five signs that it’s time for an upgrade to a more advanced requirements management tool like IBM DOORS Next:
- You have no idea who changed a requirement
If someone changes a requirement or a hazard record in Excel, there’s no built-in audit trail. Sure, you can use version history in Dropbox or SharePoint, but it’s clunky and not specific to the cell or requirement changed. In DOORS Next, every modification is tracked. You can trace who made the change, what they changed, and when.
- Conflicting versions everywhere
Everyone’s seen it: “PHL_v3_FINAL_REALLY.xlsx” or its evil twin “PHL_v3_FINAL_BobsEdits.xlsx”. With Excel, even when stored in a shared drive, people often download their own local copies and work offline, creating multiple conflicting versions. DOORS Next eliminates this by maintaining a single source of truth. Everyone works in the same repository, ensuring consistency.
- Excel lagging/crashing
Excel starts to choke once you hit a few thousand rows, especially when it’s loaded with formulas, filters, and conditional formatting. Over time, macros stop working or are blocked by your administrator due to cyber security constraints and you can’t do your job anymore. DOORS Next is designed to handle tens of thousands of artifacts across hundreds of users simultaneously. If you’re working on a major infrastructure, defence, or rail project with hundreds or even thousands of requirements, DOORS Next can keep up. Excel can’t.
- Reporting is manual and painful
Excel can produce reports if you’re a formula wizard or want to manually filter and pivot all day. In DOORS Next, reports are built in. You can filter by owner, status, source, ID, or any attribute and save it all in a view or display it in an interactive graph to share with all stakeholders. Need to present which requirements are not verified yet to estimate the remaining effort and risk? Or non-mitigated hazards to assess the validity of your SFAIRP argument? A few clicks using the built-in reporting service, and you’re there.
- Linking is brittle and error-prone
In Excel, “linking” often means manually copying IDs or inserting hyperlinks, which are brittle and prone to break. In DOORS Next, links between requirements, hazards, controls and any other engineering artefacts are real relational links: traceable and query-able. You can even generate full Requirements Verification Traceability Matrices (RVTMs) and Project Hazard Logs (PHLs) automatically. This is a life saver for requirements validation, safety arguments, and safety cases.
That said, DOORS Next isn’t always the right fit. There are many other requirements management tools with their own sets of strengths. It is important to select the right tool for your project when you’re thinking about upgrading from Excel. But that’s an entirely separate article.
Have you had your own Excel nightmares, or found a tool that really worked for your project? Join the discussion on our Linkedin page
Staff Profile: Yangyang Li | Systems Engineering Consultant
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