Are Your Drives a Mess? How to Untangle Your Spreadsheet Jungle

It is a rare company indeed that hasn’t found itself in the situation of having multiple storage locations, duplicate files and massive difficulty finding anything!

How does this happen? And what can you do about it?

If it takes you twenty minutes to find a word document that you were working on last Tuesday then you need to have a read of our tips including;

• Beware!
• I want to break free
• PPPPP
• Choosing your structure
• Communication
• Putting it into practice
• Call in the drive police

Beware!

This is perhaps the most important tip we can possibly give you when you are thinking about rearranging your storage locations.

Please, please don’t just launch into it. This is most definitely a situation where a little bit of thought will pay dividends many times over.

If you start randomly moving files and folders you risk breaking links, losing information and upsetting your people.

At the very best it will hamper your company’s operations for a while, at worst you will lose access to data.

I want to break free

So if there is a significant risk to tidying your drives why would you want to do it?

The first reason for reorganising your storage is that it allows you to find information much more quickly. If you spend forever trying to find a letterhead template or an expenses form then you need to get your drives in order.

Do you know who has access to each folder? Access control is really important in two ways; The first is that you need to restrict access to folders to people who really should have access. Your warehouse people shouldn’t be able to access your finance files or example.

The second is the opposite but just as important case. You have to make sure that the people who should have access to folders do have access to the folders.

Imagine your HR person saving critical documents on their own machine. Naturally, it is locked down so only they can access it. What happens if they are suddenly not in the business? How do you access the information?

Another reason that you want to have well-organised files is that under GDPR you should be able to delete personal data wherever it is held. If you can’t find it then you can’t delete it.

PPPPP

Perfect Planning Prevents Poor Performance and never was this more true than when reorganising your drives.

We say drives but what we are really talking about here is all storage locations such as local drives, server drives, cloud storage and even media such as SD cards and data keys.

First of all map out where all of your information is held. This will probably be much more of a task than you think and you may be surprised who has data stored and where they have stored it.

You may want to form a project team that includes people from each department and specific functions such as IT so that you can understand all of the nuances of a change.

Work out who should have access to each type of information and mark each file with a confidentiality level and whether it should be kept or not.

Think about instituting a versioning policy too so that you can work out which version of the ten copies of next year’s budget is the latest one!

Choosing your structure

In general, there are two structural methods; by function or by entity.

If you only have one business with one department and you don’t expect to grow then the choice is easy, you’ll go for function.

But if you have different companies within your group or large and busy departments then you may want to choose entity.

Functional drive structures start with a folder at the very top for each function i.e. HR, Finance, Marketing etc.

All of the documents owned by HR will be within the HR folder. This makes security easy because you know exactly who shouldn’t have any access to the HR folder.

In the entity function, you will have top-level folders that are the names of each company or department. Under the top line, you will then have sub-folders with functions.

This has the advantage that all of the data relating to a single company is in one place meaning that it is easy to sell the business and the data with it. But it means that your Finance people will have to have links to multiple finance folders for multiple companies.

There’s no right answer here other than to say that you shouldn’t use people’s names as folders. People leave and you will have no idea what data they have stored once they have gone.

Communication

So you have planned your change, chosen your structure, and you can just go ahead right?

Well no. Because if you do that you are going to have some very unhappy colleagues wondering where all of their information has gone.

You have to communicate your plans to all staff who use your storage. This will let them know what is happening and it may also highlight problems that you haven’t thought about.

As long as everyone knows what is going on, when and how they can report problems then you shouldn’t have too many problems.

Putting it into practice

Choose a day for the switch, preferably a quiet one.

Set up the top-line folders and where necessary the lower levels then give access to the people you have identified in your planning.

You can then start to move files and folders with some caveats.

The first thing to remember is that if you have sent links to people so they can access files then these won’t work any more.

Similarly, if you have applications that automatically store data in a particular place then these will fail.

And if you have links in things like spreadsheets then they won’t work in the future.

So be aware that there will be problems when you make the change and you may want to do some research into how you can get around these.

Call in the drive police

Once your new drives are working well and have settled down there is a great temptation to fall back into the old routine but this would undo all your good work.

You can institute policies that will stop people from storing data on external media or on their local machine which will help.

You can also enforce versioning so that the latest version of each file is clearly marked.

But you may need to entrust someone with the title ‘Drive Police’ and get them to periodically check that your new policies are being properly observed. They can also be in charge of managing and further changes you want to make and keeping up with any best practices.

Summary; Easy doesn’t always mean smart

Moving files around between drives is a really easy thing to do, in most cases, it will simply be a case of ‘drag and drop’.

There are good reasons to do it too. It will improve security, reduce risk and make your people more efficient.

But just because it is easy doesn’t mean that you should just launch into it without a care in the world.

Make sure you take time to understand what information you have and who should have access. Then plan and communicate the change to everyone affected.

Remember though, having a great drive structure will make your life a lot better and certainly less frustrating so good luck with your project.

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