In his blog "mind this," Lars Ploughman recently summarized a flurry of activity about a post he had made about email as a collaboration tool. His original post received a lot of attention from several industry contributors. Here is Lars Ploughman’s summary of the post and its feedback.

Ploughman’s "10-to-1 rule," which shows how 10 emails dwindle down to 1 possible action, does a very good job of showing the perils of using email to manage projects. Although much of the feedback to his original post is against email, and in favor of more collabortive tools, the reality of the workplace is that we do use email instead of collaborative tools. Email has become "good enough."

Additionally, the “management-by-email” syndrome is not limited to just projects. Many companies still use spreadsheets and emails to manage many of the processes in their business. Email is used to:

• Get approvals for documents, changes or proposals
• Check project status
• Inquire about outstanding issues or previously submitted requests that went unanswered
• Exchange various type of spreadsheets that contain budgets, plans, timesheets, expense reports, invoices, and project financials

It is amazing that any company would tolerate such lax controls in today’s world, where compliance and effective internal controls are such an imperative in every company’s operations. In a "manage-by-email-and-spreadsheet" environment, the opportunity is ripe for fraud and errors, lack of accountability and a culture of denial.

Extensive studies and research show the dangers of managing projects, people and financial processes using email and spreadsheets. We will bring more of this research to your attention in future posts.