The $3,000/Month You’re Spending on Project Plans That Don’t Work

Your engineering manager spent six hours last week rebuilding a project timeline in SmartSheet. Again.

Monday's executive review asked for a different scope breakdown. Wednesday the engineering team flagged dependencies that weren't captured. Friday they rebuilt it again when finance needed a different resource view for budget approval.

Each version took two hours. Each version triggered another round of feedback that required yet another rebuild.

At $150/hour loaded cost for a senior engineering leader, that's $900 in a single week—on one person, on one plan. Scale that across a month and you're at $3,600 just in rebuilding time, before you count the hours spent creating the plan in the first place.

This is what planning costs when your tools aren’t designed for planning.

The Symptoms You’re Ignoring

You know this problem exists. You’ve just accepted it as normal. But normal isn’t the same as necessary.

1. You’ve remade the same plan three or more times this quarter.
Not updated it—remade it. Started from scratch because the old version was too broken to salvage.

2. Your stakeholder presentations take longer to create than the meetings themselves.
You spend two hours simplifying a complex plan into slides, then another hour when someone asks for a different view.

3. You’re manually copying data between tools.
Your “system” is SmartSheet plus PowerPoint plus a spreadsheet for resource tracking plus Miro for the dependency map. Nothing talks to anything else.

4. Your “project plan” is actually four different documents.
Nobody—including you—knows which one is current.

If three or more of these describe your situation, you’re not planning. You’re performing planning theater while burning engineering hours.

The Math Your Finance Team Doesn’t See

Here’s what this actually costs:

- Direct time waste
Engineering leaders typically spend 20-40 hours monthly on planning activities—creating plans, updating them, reformatting them for different audiences. At $150/hour, that’s $3,000-$6,000/month in senior talent doing spreadsheet work.

But the direct time cost is just the start.

- Opportunity cost
Those hours could go toward technical decisions, team development, or solving engineering problems. Instead, they're spent fighting with tools.

- Communication cost
Stakeholders make decisions based on plans that are already wrong. By the time the exec team approves a timeline, the assumptions underneath it have shifted.

- Iteration cost
When plans break, teams don’t iterate—they restart. Every major change means rebuilding from scratch because your tools don’t support rapid replanning.

The $3,000/month you can measure. The cost of decisions made on bad plans is harder to calculate—but it's where projects actually fail.

The Tool Problem Nobody Talks About

Your engineering manager is doing $3,000/month of planning work with tools that cost $0-50/month.

That’s not saving money. That’s burning talent.

SmartSheet, Excel, Microsoft Project—these tools make you pay in time instead of dollars. They’re cheap to license and expensive to use. Every hour your senior engineers spend manually calculating critical paths or reformatting Gantt charts for different audiences is an hour they’re not engineering.

The tools designed for planning either don’t exist in your price range or require enterprise implementations you can’t justify. So you’ve settled for tools designed for something else and made them work through brute force.

That brute force has a name: your engineering leadership’s time.

What Good Planning Actually Looks Like

Planning should take minutes to update, not hours to rebuild.

When your team makes a strategic shift in priorities, you should adjust one input and see the cascade across your entire project—dependencies, critical path, resource needs—immediately. Not manually trace through a spreadsheet hunting for everything that needs to change.

When an executive asks for a different view, you should be able to generate it in seconds. High-level milestones for the board. Detailed dependencies for the engineering team. Resource forecasts for finance. Same underlying plan, different visualizations.

When assumptions change, you iterate on your plan, not restart it.

We’re Opening Early Access Next Week

We built Soufflé because we were tired of watching hardware teams burn senior engineering time on planning theater.

It’s a goal-first planning tool that works the way hardware projects actually work: start with your end goal, map dependencies backward, and generate stakeholder-ready visualizations automatically. When things change—and they always change—you update once and everything downstream recalculates.

We're opening early access next week with a limited number of spots.

If you want to see how to cut your planning time by 75% and get plans your stakeholders will actually understand, join the waitlist before we fill those spots.

Your engineering leaders have better things to do than rebuild Gantt charts in slide format.