Every office has The Spreadsheet. Sometimes it is a notebook, sometimes a sticky note colony, once a laminated card taped inside a cupboard. It holds the shared passwords, everyone knows where it is, and that is precisely the problem.
Replacing it is not a technical project. We have done this enough times to have opinions about the order of events.
Before anyone installs anything
- Pick one product and stop comparing. The differences between the good ones are smaller than the cost of another month of dithering.
- Decide who can recover an account when someone forgets their master password. It will happen in week one.
- Get the boss to go first, visibly.
The first fortnight
- Day one: install and one password. Ten minutes per person, at their desk. They save one password they use daily and watch it fill itself in. That small moment of magic does more than any training session.
- Week one: shared vaults. Move The Spreadsheet in, one section at a time, and tell people it has moved.
- Week two: retire The Spreadsheet. Properly. Delete it, shred it, peel it off the cupboard. While it exists, it is the system.
The objection you will hear
"Isn't it dangerous to keep every password in one place?" It is a fair question. The honest answer is that they are already in one place, and that place is a spreadsheet called passwords-NEW-final.xlsx.
What success looks like
Three months in, nobody should be able to tell you the Wi-Fi password, the bank login or the supplier portal credentials, because nobody has typed them since spring. When someone leaves, you remove one person from one system and rotate only what they could see.
That last part is what makes offboarding a twenty-minute job instead of an afternoon of guesswork.