Sixty people, three meetings each, one spreadsheet
A client is restructuring its operations team. Sixty employees are affected. Your consultancy is running the process with the client's managers. There will be group meetings, individual meetings, letters at each stage, questions from staff, possibly selection information, and in some cases offers of alternative roles.
It all goes into a spreadsheet. Columns for each meeting date, a column for 'letter sent?', a column for notes that gets wider every day. Two consultants and three client managers edit it. By the second week, nobody trusts it.
Why a spreadsheet struggles
- Many people update it, and changes overwrite each other.
- Meeting scheduling happens in calendars, separate from the tracker.
- Letters are drafted in Word and the spreadsheet only records a 'yes'.
- Questions from employees arrive by email and are answered inconsistently.
- Selection information is sensitive and should not sit in the same sheet everyone opens.
The client's managers add another layer. They are running their normal jobs at the same time, they attend some meetings and not others, and they naturally want to reassure staff in corridors. Without one shared view of where each person is in the process, what a manager says informally can drift away from what the letters say.
The process itself may be well designed by your advisers. It is the administration of it that falls apart under volume.
What goes wrong
An employee misses a meeting invitation. A letter goes out with the wrong date. Two employees ask the same question and get different answers. A manager sees selection information about someone they should not. Each mistake is small, but in a restructure every mistake lands on someone who is already worried, and it can undermine a process that was otherwise run with care.
| Area | Spreadsheet approach | Tracker approach |
|---|---|---|
| Stage per employee | Column updated by hand | Stage recorded with dates and history |
| Meetings | Separate calendar entries | Scheduled from the tracker, invites sent |
| Letters | Drafted in Word, marked 'yes' | Generated from your templates, logged |
| Employee questions | Individual email replies | Logged, answered from agreed responses |
| Sensitive information | Visible to everyone | Access restricted by role |
How we build the restructure tracker
- Each affected employee has a record: role, team, manager and the stages your advisers set for this process.
- Meetings are scheduled from the tracker into consultants' and managers' Outlook calendars, with invitations and letters to employees generated from your approved templates.
- Letters are logged with date, method and version, so there is no doubt about what went to whom.
- Employee questions arrive through a single mailbox or form, are logged, and answered using responses your advisers have agreed, with new questions sent to a consultant.
- Selection or assessment information is held in a separate restricted area, visible only to the people your process allows.
- A dashboard shows every employee's stage, upcoming meetings, overdue actions and open questions.
The process, its stages and every decision in it are set by your advisers and the client. The tracker keeps the administration accurate and visible.
What the process feels like afterwards
Consultants and client managers work from one source rather than a spreadsheet they second-guess. Meetings and letters run on time and match each other. Employees get consistent answers. Sensitive information stays with the right people. And when the restructure ends, there is a complete, organised record of what happened, which your advisers will value if anything is questioned later.
Consultancies that run restructures regularly also get something reusable: a set of templates and stages that can be adapted for the next one.
Recognise this?
- Restructures are tracked in a shared spreadsheet that several people edit.
- Meeting invitations and letters are handled separately from the tracker.
- Employees have received inconsistent answers to the same question.
- Selection information is not properly restricted.
- You rebuild the admin from scratch for every restructure.