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The Friday Night Spreadsheet Rodeo: Why Your Highest-Paid People Are Doing the Lowest-Value Work
It’s 6:00 PM on a Friday. The sun has set over the site. The crews have gone home to their families. The laydown yard is quiet.
But the lights in the construction trailer are still blazing.
Inside, your Project Manager—an engineer you hired for their strategic thinking and problem-solving skills—is hunched over a laptop. They aren't optimizing a schedule or solving a complex engineering challenge.
They are trying to figure out why a VLOOKUP formula is returning a #REF! error.
Welcome to the "Weekly Progress Report" Ritual.
The Rise of the "Data Janitor"
We are in the middle of a renewable energy boom, yet the industry’s dirty little secret is how much critical reporting still relies on manual brute force.
Because project data lives in disconnected silos—the schedule in P6, procurement in the ERP, field progress on clipboards or disparate apps—there is no single source of truth.
Someone has to manually stitch it all together to create the Monday Morning executive PowerPoint. That person is usually your PM or Project Engineer.
Instead of managing the project, they are spending 10-15 hours a week acting as a "Data Janitor"—cleaning up messy spreadsheets, copy-pasting rows, and chasing down superintendents for updates via text message.
The "Monday Morning Lie"
The tragedy of the Friday Night Spreadsheet Rodeo isn't just the wasted time or the burnout. It’s that the resulting report is usually obsolete the moment it’s finished.
By the time the data is aggregated, formatted, and presented to leadership on Monday morning, it is already three or four days old.
Execs think they are looking at a real-time dashboard. In reality, they are looking at a historical archive. You can’t steer a multimillion-dollar ship by looking in the rearview mirror.
We have accepted manual reporting as "just part of the job." It isn’t. It’s a symptom of broken data infrastructure. It’s time to stop asking high-value humans to do low-value robot work.
