I have seen hundreds of companies and organizations create an absolute mess in their attempts to build an electronic portfolio. What was once the ubiquitous filing cabinet with 4 drawers has become an ever expanding nightmare for CEOs, controllers and Operations Managers. Fortunately Building Better Practice has seen the best of the best and has these three tips for your consideration.

1. Identify ‘owners’ and ‘co-owners’
In order to protect valuable information, for each major document identify who the keyauthor or owner is. For example: Board minutes (President, co-owner CEO); Budget (Controller, co-owner CEO); Policy manual (Operations, Co-owner CEO; Contracts (Operations, co-owner Controller), Strategic Plan (CEO, co-owner Operations), etc. Because you have taken this systemic breakdown of key tools/functions the CEO now has an inventory of the institutional memory of the company. This is a great team brainstorming exercise and I would suggest aiming for the top 20 key documents.

2. Develop a storage taxonomy
Now that we are less distressed about the aging filing cabinet, even though it still has great value, we have met technology. The fantastic ability of the search function has helped thousands of people find key documents, but when was the last time you searched for a keyword and 250 files popped up? Exactly. Now that we have broken down a key structural list of major documents, consider your taxonomy to sort these documents so can a)find them easily b) sort them by date, and c) identify them by version.

A few quick examples based on tip #1
– 2017-BoardMinutes-March- Draft1.docx
– 2017-BoardMinutes-March-Final. docx

Or
– Policy-Ethics-20170321.docx
– Budget-2017-March-Backup.xlsx

3. Backup key structural folders
I spent an hour looking through my filing cabinet the other day searching for an insurance document and even though I had a folder called Insurance… guess what, it wasn’t there. Fortunately I am the owner of the document and I have a taxonomy so I will easily be able to look on my computer for the folder Home, Subfolder, Insurance and immediately see the file 2016-HomeInsurance-Scan.jpg and the day was saved.

So now let’s reverse engineer that. You have a team of 30 people and each of them have 5 key documents that are sorted. Since at this level of company there is likely an administrative assistant of some sort to help. I suggest twice a year, pick off the top documents in this network of files and curate it into a snapshot folder for the CEO. This inventory can be reviewed and adapted based on the CEO’s needs.

MAYBE, at this point you will be able to create a dashboard so that you can prepare for the Ubiquitous Building Better Practice 3 Day Company Health Check-up where I visit your company and assess new ways that your company can become more efficient and take away the pain of trying to manage people, systems, and infrastructures.

Call us today at 1-800-840-6132 to book your consultation.