Re: developing a fun and/or relatively simple activity that demonstrates the benefits of cleaning up shared drives or how to go about doing this

Hi Elizabeth,

I have been working on cleaning up and reorganizing our file shares for the last few years with pretty good results.  Our reorg was endorsed by upper level management and required departments to organize their file shares according to our functional plan.  We also began educating our organization that all information needs to be managed and not just those items identified as records.  As a result, this effort also included the scheduling of non-records or working files.  

I focused my initial energies on educating the records management coordinators in each Department.  The primary focus was on files management.  I then opened up the training to the general staff population.  Prior to this effort, we started educating all staff during our annual RIM Clean-Up & Education events through action items, trivia, etc.

Each training included a lot of real life touchstones and interactive activities in small groups, such as:
- organizing a movie collection
- organizing a music collection
- grocery shopping with individual lists from family members rather than one master list
- organizing closets, refrigerators, etc.

Each of these activities were followed by a debrief - what did they notice during their group activity, how did the team come to their organizational decisions, etc.  

Once I made more personal life connections, I then moved on to activities that focused on organizing documents within the agency.  This strategy was successful because participants could draw on the more personal life examples for reference.  

Visuals are always helpful and even more so in this kind of effort.  When presenting to Departments, I would do a big reveal by showing a before and after image of the department's network drive.  This usually had a big impact because it went from an image of a ton of folders to one that had a more simple and cleaner organization.  

Were there growing pains - of course!  Overall, however, we were very successful.  

I am happy to discuss this in more detail with you offline if you have any questions.

Warmly,

Jessica Fairchild
Manager, Records & Information | Corporate & Information Governance
T 619.400.2554 | F 619.400.2549
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