Why Your File Organization Is Failing Your Team and How to Fix It
When I started at Loews Hotels, I walked into a well-established file and project organization system. The problem was it was clunky, inefficient, and not well-suited to its purpose. Files were organized by project, according to the billing code of the person requesting the job. With recurring annual or semi-annual projects, what if a different team opted to cover the cost that year? That job would be under a different billing code, separate from previous iterations. Want to see what designs looked like year over year? Good luck. To make it worse, the billing codes were neither few nor intuitive. Finding a project was a multi-step process that required a conversation with the manager or guessing at the name of the job, a search in our project management system to attempt to find the billing code and job number, then moving over to our server to dig it out. Also, rather than grouping campaigns and events together, every single deliverable had a unique job number. At best, deliverables were in separate folders under the same billing code. At worst, they were split across billing codes in different areas of the server. It was impossible to see a project as a whole. In short, insight into previous work, and by extension comprehension of our brand as a whole, was hard to come by.
“This is how it’s been done for over 10 years, and somehow we’ve managed.”
Being a systems-thinker, this was driving me crazy within days of being introduced to the process. Our team couldn’t elevate our brand if we couldn’t even see our body of work. So I immediately started campaigning for an overhaul to the structure of the server. And was immediately met with resistance. “This is how it’s been done for over 10 years, and somehow we’ve managed.” I tried to articulate the reasons why the current system was complicated, relied too much on tribal knowledge, and didn’t benefit our needs. No dice. They were too ingrained in the inefficiencies to see the value of rethinking. So it stayed on my mind until a year later when our management changed and the new blood was receptive to looking at the whole with fresh eyes. It also helped that our IT department was migrating our server to the cloud. What better time to reassess?
I seized the moment and set about developing an organization system that was simple but powerful.
First, all deliverables for a campaign were grouped into one project. Now, if you found a project, you could see everything that was included in that project. Breakthrough, right?
Second, projects were arranged by type and by property rather than billing code. Want to find the invitation to the gala at the Miami Beach location? Go to Sales > Miami Beach > Gala. Need to see the Thanksgiving menu for the Chicago hotel? Food & Beverage > Chicago > Thanksgiving. Easy. The billing code was of no use to us designers in trying to find and look back on our body of work, so rather than file by it, I organized in a way that you would be able to find something more intuitively and without the need to cross-reference (the billing code and project number remained in the file name as the unique identifier and was searchable if needed).
Third, within a project folder, there had been many sub-folders (Working Files, Assets, Links, Job Info, Correspondence, PDFs, Final Files), most of which were redundant or rarely used. These sub-folders were left when a job was completed, used or empty, adding clutter and more time spent digging. The new structure included three sub-folders: Assets, Working, and Final. Communication was stored in our project management software.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I codified our best practices —
Standardized naming conventions such as including dimensions and dates (rather than ‘update’) in file names, and not including spaces or special characters.
Centralized assets (photography, logos, swatches, maps, etc.) - this was huge because before we were copying assets into every new project, risking versioning issues and taking up a huge amount of storage. With the new method, we utilized centralized assets until exporting the final output.
All told, it was a four-month process of brainstorming with my manager, debating the pros and cons with my team, and then the tedious work of actually re-filing thousands of folders. But it was worth it. My teammates couldn’t believe how much quicker it was to work and wondered why we had suffered for so long. Our productivity soared. We could spend more time designing because we now had a system that worked for us rather than the other way around!
Look, I’m not a systems analyst or technical person by trade. My job title was Graphic Designer—this undertaking was nowhere in my job responsibilities. But as a designer, I look beyond adjusting layouts and making things look pretty. What keeps me up at night is thinking about optimizing the experience. Improving our own experience, even in mundane ways such as a better file structure, gives a team the freedom to perform at their best.