Well, in my book the best practices for a retention schedule is do what
works best for your industry and company. Some multi-national
conglomerate that has 20 different lines of business will have vastly
different needs than a company with one product in one state. Or a
privately held vs publicly held company.

I am working at paring down our retention schedule, but not to just five
big buckets. We do one thing --- build houses. Retention-wise a vast
majority of our records are project related and need to be retained for
a set number of years after the last house in a subdivision is sold. As
we have quite a bit of litigation, we need a bit more indexing than that
for searching purposes, but I really want to make it as easy as possible
on the users to categorize their documents.

The big-bucket idea reminds me of a job I once had. It was a small
mom-and-pop business. The owner took every invoice he paid and "filed"
them by literally tossing them into a big cardboard box under his desk
(It was about the size that a old-style 27" TV might come in). His
theory was that the number of times that someone actually asked him
something that required him to look up an invoice was so few that he
would rather spend 2 hours searching once, than to spend 15-30 minutes a
week filing. If you add it up, for him, it made sense.

Nolene
 
Nolene Sherman | Director of Records Management | Standard Pacific Homes
| 949-727-9360 | FAX 949-789-3379 | [log in to unmask]


-----Original Message-----

Just a few thoughts.... but, when it comes to defining how narrowly or
how broadly to define records series and how to best apply differing
retention requirements (imposed by government agencies), it appears that
we don't have a RIM consensus on what our best practices might be.

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