File Management — Network Drive

Arizona Christian University

Organize the University’s Network Marketing Drive

Project Overview

THE OPPORTUNITY

Arizona Christian University was looking to organize their network marketing drive to enable users to locate files more efficiently and utilize them to either reuse or revise.

THE HURDLE

The drive contained approximately 12,000 folders and 300,000 files that appeared to have little structure or adhere to a folder or file naming convention. With a high turnover of Marketing Department employees, the organization of folder and file names varied. Even within an individual employee’s folder there appeared to be no consistency.

THE SOLUTION

An audit of the drive was completed to understand the type of files that were stored there, who they were created for, and for what project they served. The University departments that the Marketing Department services was learned in order to organize and implement a new folder structure. Folder and file naming conventions were also defined.

DETAILS

Project Length: Ongoing
Team: 1 person
Role: Project Manager and Taxonomist
My Contributions:

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

TAXONOMY

Discover & Learn

RESEARCH PERFORMED

Prior to the folder restructure and naming conventions being proposed, the following items and questions needed to be addressed:

  1. Access: The IT Department provided me with access to the University marketing drive.

  2. Audit

    1. Numbers: I identified a total of 11,562 folders and 295,484 files on the drive.

    2. Review: I reviewed the folder structure and files on the drive (snapshot below).

  3. Questions

    1. What departments does the Marketing Department serve?

    2. What files are most likely to be reused and/or revised?

    3. Are there any folders on the drive that another department owns?

    4. Who has access to the drive that should be notified about the restructuring and renaming of the folders and files?

MARKETING DRIVE (ORIGINAL STATE)

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Strategize & Plan

PLANNING PERFORMED

After the initial items were addressed and answered, I was able to start planning the restructuring and naming conventions at a high-level.

  1. Folders: Since the drive is meant to store final versions of the files, I needed to ensure the structure was intuitive to a user looking for a file to either reuse and/or revise (as opposed to organizing a structure based on a workflow or timeline). I wanted the structure to go three to four levels deep at maximum, otherwise users may have difficulty finding the files.

  2. File Names: Because folders and files can be located on the drive by searching words within their name, I wanted to ensure the names contained descriptive keywords.

Concept & Proposal

I defined the various levels of the folder structure and created naming conventions (examples below).

  1. Folders

    1. Level 1

      1. Department: Since the Marketing Department exists to serve other University departments, it made the most sense to create a folder structure based on the various departments that submit projects to the Marketing Department. I identified 19 departments and categories that the Marketing Department creates collateral for.

      2. Personal: For any personal folders on the drive that had names of active employees, I contacted them to see if their folder and its contents could be moved from the drive. There were several personal folders of former employees that contained marketing collateral, which would be moved into their respective folders once the restructuring was implemented.

      3. Current/Archive: Since there were a significant amount of files that were old and could be archived, I decided the Level 1 folder structure would account for both the current and archived files. The Level 1 folder structure would have a folder for the current files (files created after the University did a rebranding in 2019) and an archive folder, named “z_Archive”, which would fall last alphabetically in the structure and store all of the files created before the 2019 rebranding.

    2. Level 2

      1. Project: Once the departments and categories folders were identified, the subfolders would be named by the project.

    3. Level 3

      1. Asset Type: Within each project subfolder would live an asset type folder that defined the type of collateral being created for each project.

  2. File Names: Because folders and files can be found on the drive by searching words within the name, I had to ensure the file names were descriptive. I came up with the following file naming convention(s):

    1. DEPARTMENTABBREVIATION_Project_AssetType_Destination_Version_YearMonthDate

    2. CATEGORYABBREVIATION_Project_AssetType_Destination_Version_YearMonthDate

FEEDBACK

The overall feedback I received was positive in regard to the structure and folder and file naming conventions. There were suggestions to either remove certain Level 1 folders or revise their names.

Final Implementation

I was able to implement the new folder structure immediately. I reduced the Level 1 folders from 172 to 19. The file naming conventions are utilized as new projects are created. The moving and renaming of archived files is still a work in progress.

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BUSINESS IMPACT

An organized drive allows for users to locate files more efficiently and utilize them to either reuse or revise. Though it is difficult to quantify the amount of time and effort saved by implementing a new structure and naming conventions, following best practices always yields better results.