Bare Minimum Filing

The bare-minimum digital filing system that your team will actually use.

Most filing systems fail not because people are disorganized, but because the system tries to be everything to everyone - and ends up so time consuming or complicated that users do one of two things: file things in the system or folder root instead of the correct folder, or worse, don’t use the system at all, and keep the files in their own system.

The best filing system is user-friendly, needs minimal support, and prescriptive.

What follows is what I think is the simplest useful filing system¹, that scales nicely from a solo consultant to a 20-person team without constant policing.

The value

A system like this trades exhaustive granularity for predictable behavior. It reduces cognitive load, surfaces ownership, and prevents documentation and documentation processes from becoming mere window-dressing

Teams can stop spending so much time policing and fussing over structure and start just using documents.

Minimum core principles (to use religiously)

One source of truth. There is one copy of each document and it lives in the team filing system. Use and sharing of the official, live, read-only document is strongly encouraged. Individuals may (and will) hold and share duplicates but the rule is that they know (and share) that it’s an uncontrolled copy.

Purpose-first folders. Folders are named for outcomes, not workteams, tools, 'topics' or anything arbitrary (see below for examples).

No more than 3 folder levels – a strict rule of thumb that saves immense amounts of time filing and/or finding.

Strict naming. Use an intuitive, obvious naming convention. e.g. YYYY-MM-DD_ProjectCode/#_Title_Revision#.

Controlled access. Write-access is limited to folder/file owners and delegates. Everyone else has read only.

Folder Schema Examples

Adapt and/or mix-and-match at will.

Consultants

Intake — intake forms, discovery notes, client agreements in draft.

Projects — active project folders, with standardized subfolders.

Policies — stable, organization-level procedures and decision rules.

Templates — canonical templates for deliverables and procedures.

Archive — files from completed projects or older than required, for audit, lessons learned and record-keeping purposes.

Business/operations/project/technical teams

Onboarding and Orientation – anything needed for starting and orienting new hires, or that new team members might need to know

Governance – Policies, governance reporting, anything required by governance or created for their use/info

Project Management – files related to the practice (in general or for this project) of project management; often includes Stakeholders folder; all or part may need to have restricted access

Team Management – files related to the management of the team; often includes Stakeholders folder; all or part may need to have restricted access

Project Stages – Design, Development, Delivery/Implementation (including succeeding revisions of project/assignment plans)

Compliance – anything that might explain or be required for compliance with company, industry or government regulations

Administration – anything used and owned primarily by administration such as filing system information, photos, scheduling, office equipment, visitor regulations, security info, etc.

Archive — files from completed projects or older than required, for audit, lessons learned and record-keeping purposes.

Folder Brief

The single, top-of-folder reference document containing essential information about folder contents.

Every folder at a previously decided and standardized level (system size-dependent) must contain a single file named FolderName_Brief.xxx containing the following information (minimum).

Admin and Folder Owner - Name and contact info for both

What to file here - Folder contents or list of sub-folders and their contents

How to file here - any instructions, especially if metadata or revisioning are required

Folder Current status - Active / Archived

This file provides answers to simple filing questions and is the quickest way to get answers to other questions from the admin or folder owner.

Versioning vs Revisioning

Whether the system/platform versions documents automatically or not, revisioning may be required. The One Truth principle requires either versioning or revisioning for all documents. Revisioning is recommended for canonical² documents, plans or documents containing important reference information whether automatic versioning is in place or not.

Versioning (usually automated) keeps the previous version of a document every time it is changed and saved, tracking iterative edits and draft iterations during active work; versions can be frequent and informal and usually don’t involve changing the document title.

Revisioning, on the other hand, is the practice of flagging specific versions as official revisions which obsolete any previous revisions; revisions are formal, tracked releases which represent One Truth where that document is concerned; revisions usually include the revision# in the document title, as per the filing system naming conventions, and optionally include further revision information in a document headers and revisions blocks.

Simple rules for lightweight onboarding

Walk the team or new team member through: the folder system, contents, filing requirements, including naming convention.

No personal drives for storage of files anyone else might ever want to see or archive
No shared folders without an owner.
No filing-by-email; same rule as for personal drives, plus files from emails must be uploaded to the shared system within 48 hours of sending or receiving.
If you can’t find where to put it in 90 seconds, create a new folder including a Folder Brief and put it there
If you can’t find what you are looking for in 90 seconds, contact the team admin or folder owner

Best practice – use metadata

I recommend SharePoint Libraries2 for most filing, with its matrix-style metadata functionality supporting multiple ways of filing and finding single-copy files. It’s best for One Truth, quick filing and file recovery, versioning, 1 to 2-level filing systems, and more. If you are using SharePoint for filing, learn SharePoint libraries and stay away from folders³. If you must have folders, use Windows Explorer.

¹ for systems without metadata

² the official, authoritative or standardized version of a document, that serves as the definitive reference

³ folders in SharePoint provide none of the key, essential, functionality of either SharePoint Libraries or Windows Explorer