A head of digital in New Zealand told me his agencies, leading advertising and marketing names, run their project tracking on Google Sheets. Not as a stopgap. As the system.
It sounds like a failure of ambition until you look closer. Everyone can open it, nobody needs training, it costs nothing, and it bends to whatever shape the work takes.
The spreadsheet survives every platform migration, every rebrand, every new operations director with a favourite tool. It is the cockroach of project management, and I mean that as praise.
The lesson is not that sheets beat software. It is that a clear system in a plain tool beats a vague system in an expensive one.
Need someone to get your project over the line?
Project delivery support for brand, digital, and creative teams that need clearer direction and smoother progress.