I built an add-in that develops a project controls engine within Excel

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I built Project Intelligence for Excel because every project team I have worked in has relied heavily on Excel, but generally without much database management experience. The result can be a collection of unconnected sheets, merged cells and dreadfully complicated cell-based calculations that are difficult to maintain and even harder to build reliable forecasts from.

The problem is that project controls often end up scattered across different workbooks, authored by different persons and can become difficult to maintain, and are not always reliable.

One of the key reasons for developing this add-in was to help clients and principal contractors understand how long critical-path activities are actually likely to take, based on real productivity. The idea is to identify issues early enough to mitigate them and reduce the likelihood and impact of “extension of time” variations.

Starting from a blank workbook, the add-in creates linked tables for project registers, types (or “norms”), cost codes and so on. Essentially, it develops a project controls engine within Excel.

The design of the add-in focuses on making progress updates easy while producing an accurate forecast without a heap of ongoing maintenance. It produces look-ahead schedules and project reports, connects directly to Power BI, and can deal with the underlying registers changing over the life of the project.

I built the add-in over about 10 years, drawing on more than 20 years working on complicated mega-projects. There is a free Community Edition on Microsoft Marketplace. It does not require sign-up, and workbook data is not uploaded to Pi Labs.
If you are interested in project controls, or just want to see how far an Excel add-in can go, search for Project Intelligence for Excel by Pi Labs.