Spreadsheet-based tracking can’t support RBQM or modern study accountability.
Clinical project management isn’t failing because people don’t care, it’s failing because the systems we use were never designed for the weight we’ve put on them.
1. Life Inside the Project Delivery Machine
Every morning starts the same way:
Tabs, trackers, and tabs of trackers.
One Excel file for site activation. Another for vendor milestones. A third for regulatory submissions. Add a risk register, monitoring plan, and milestone tracker, then finish with an inbox full of “quick updates.” You spend more time cross-referencing than progressing.
The work looks like control. It feels like chaos.
And deep down, you know it.
You’re maintaining the illusion of stability, reconciling mismatched data, re-entering updates, checking that the version marked Final_v4_approved really is final. What isn’t captured in those sheets lives in your brain; what’s buried in your inbox may as well not exist.
This is what good project management has come to mean in many biotech and CRO teams: an exhausting loop of spreadsheet archaeology.
You aren’t managing the project anymore, you’re maintaining its symptoms.
The emotional texture of this world?
Frazzled. Stressed. Guilty.
The hallmark feeling of professionals living in what we at Mayet call the Valley of Pressure, the place where leadership demands rise, and everything you need to manage, timelines, data, subordinates are creating issues.
2. The Illusion of Control
For years, we’ve told ourselves that the better we maintain our trackers, the safer our projects will be.
But that’s the lie of modern project delivery.
More tracking doesn’t mean more control, it means more dependency on tools that can’t hold context.
Spreadsheets, Smartsheet, Airtable, Asana, Trello, Monday — call it what you like, but the architecture is the same. These are brilliant productivity tools, not validated systems of record. They record content but lose context. They reward diligence but obscure progress.
Every new column, tab, or workaround is another layer of compensation for a system that can’t actually represent how a trial operates: 20+ interdependent projects: vendors, sites, submissions, and milestones — all flowing through one fragile network of humans.
It’s like a living body compensating for an untreated injury.
You can function for a while. You can even look healthy.
But every workaround adds strain, until something finally gives.
3. The Three Cracks in Your Project Delivery System
You can spot dysfunction long before it breaks.
Ask yourself these three questions, and score them honestly.
1. Data Integrity
“I don’t know which version of the tracker is correct — or what Sarah, the new PM, updated in the last two weeks.”
If this sounds familiar, your project data has already started drifting. Without version control, audit trails, or validation, every copy of every tracker becomes its own micro-reality.
Studies show that 88–94% of operational spreadsheets contain errors — and most of them go unnoticed until it’s too late (Panko, 2016; Lumeer.io, 2023).
In a regulated context, that’s not an efficiency issue — it’s a compliance fault line.
2. Operational Visibility
“I have a tracker for every workflow, but only I know how they connect. I’m the single point of truth — and the single point of failure.”
This is where Truth Drift begins.
Disconnected systems create shadow processes and communication gaps.
Leaders believe everything’s under control because the dashboards look colourful, but beneath that order lies chaos — a web of manual updates and Teams threads that only one person fully understands.
3. Effort vs. Value
“I spend more than half my week writing documents, updating Excels, sending status emails, and presenting progress — the rest of the time I get to do my real job.”
That’s not project management; that’s project maintenance.
Research across industries suggests that spreadsheet users spend up to 50% of their time managing data instead of producing outcomes (Oracle, 2022).
It’s wasted FTE — and it’s silently costing trials millions.
4. The Hidden Cost Curve
These cracks don’t just waste hours. They accumulate into three escalating costs that every sponsor and CRO quietly pays for.
Stage 1 – Administrative Waste
Hours, even days, of skilled FTE time lost to manual reconciliation.
It’s the human tax for using tools that can’t talk to each other. Every new update or version request steals time from real delivery work.
Stage 2 – Quality Rework
What starts as small inconsistencies become deviations, CAPAs, and root-cause investigations.
Each one burns time, creates paperwork, and damages confidence. When regulators audit, they don’t just inspect your results — they inspect your systems.
And as the EMA Guideline on Computerised Systems and Electronic Data in Clinical Trials (2023) states, any system that influences trial conduct must be validated, traceable, and tamper-evident.
Excel doesn’t qualify.
Stage 3 – Strategic Delay
Every day a trial is delayed increases operational costs and pushes your drug’s market entry further away.
While money and time drain into admin and rework, innovation stalls.
You can’t pivot to new studies when all your energy is consumed keeping old systems alive.
It’s a slow bleed, from wasted effort to wasted opportunity.
The tragedy is that most organisations don’t feel it happening until the burn rate starts showing up in the finance dashboard.
5. The Ripple Effect Across Teams
The cracks never stop at the project manager’s desk.
- QA ends up raising deviations for inconsistent documentation — chasing signatures and version histories that don’t exist.
- Regulatory sits in limbo, waiting for “final” approvals that live on someone’s desktop.
- Finance absorbs the fallout through unplanned change orders and delay-related overspend.
- Leadership gets the illusion of control — dashboards, trackers, charts — but not the assurance that anything underneath is actually real.
The organisation becomes a living system of compensation — each department adapting to survive the inefficiency of the last.
It’s compliance theatre.
And it’s expensive.
6. How to Spot Truth Drift in Your Own Trial
If you’re not sure how deep your cracks go, look for these telltale signs:
- You spend more time reporting progress than making it.
- You need at least three people to agree before you can trust a number.
- You’ve built an unofficial “source of truth” file that only lives on your laptop.
- You’re quietly terrified of what would happen if you got hit by a bus.
These aren’t signs of failure — they’re symptoms of a system not designed for the complexity of your work.
If you’re wondering what better looks like, TrialTrack is reimagining project delivery for the regulated world — connecting vendors, sites, and milestones in one compliant, auditable context.
(You can join the early waitlist to see how it works in practice.)
7. A New Way to Think About Project Delivery
The mindset shift isn’t from Excel to Asana, or from Asana to Monday.
It’s from Progress Through Maintenance to Progress Through Enablement.
Real oversight means the system itself carries the compliance burden, not the project manager.
When audit trails, validations, and traceability are built in, your people stop being human safety nets and start being strategic drivers again.
Other industries have already made this leap — finance, logistics, manufacturing. Clinical operations can’t remain the exception.
We need to move from manual assurance to systemic assurance — where compliance is a natural byproduct of doing the work, not a second job you do after the work.
8. Misery Loves Company — But Progress Loves Change
If this article felt a little too familiar, that’s because you’re not alone.
Everyone in this industry knows the feeling of chasing trackers that don’t tell the truth.
Everyone has sat in that Friday meeting wondering whether their update was already outdated.
You deserve tools — and systems — that keep up with your competence.
That’s why we’re building TrialTrack: a project-delivery platform made for clinical research, where context, compliance, and collaboration finally live in the same place.
Every action traced. Every milestone auditable. Every user empowered.
Join the waitlist today — not just to see new software, but to stand with the growing community that’s done apologising to its trackers and ready to deliver projects that prove themselves.
Because misery may love company, but progress loves change.
Interested in How Mayet can help you?
Mayet’s software solutions are all designed with compliance features for the new era of digital oversight with user management, audit trails, GXP system testing for validation and cyber security, these are the minimum expectation not value adds.
- Mayet Vendor Management Software: Manage your clinical trial vendors all in one place.
- TrialTrack (Featured in Article): Clinical project management for users tired of excel and email, also underserved by over featured and over priced CTMS.
- AI as a Service: Get a fully secured AI LLM trained on your company’s data for contextual responses and analyses, through our partners privatemode.ai
- Bespoke Software Development: got a need, want to build it, we do that too.
References
- Panko, R. (2016). What We Know About Spreadsheet Errors. Journal of Accounting Education.
- Lumeer.io: Spreadsheet for Project Management (2023).
- Oracle: Spreadsheet Risks (2022).
- EMA Guideline on Computerised Systems and Electronic Data in Clinical Trials (2023).
