In 2019 I was presented with a problem to solve. The department I worked in (about 150 employees) had no way to track projects and any data collected was correlated manually. This was compounded by the issue that there was zero budget to fix this. I created a comprehensive proposal detailing out a portfolio project management system and presented 5 options on how to accomplish the goal. The options ranged from a complex series of spreadsheets and white boards to a fully custom app. As is often the case, the organization chose the cheapest option and I was presented with the challenge of building the best PPM software possible in spreadsheets. 3 months later, with 350 google sheets tracking 981 individual data points for each project, and consolidating all of that information into a dozen dashboards, we finally had a “free” PPM system.