There are some trade-offs and issues that have to be taken into consideration in going big bucket. Generally, the larger the buckets the longer the retention periods, because each bucket scoops up more records and  their retention periods, and likewise scoops up more legal or risk management considerations along with them. Since generally the longest applicable retention period controls the retention of the entire bucket, that means the bigger your buckets the more the retention periods  get pushed out.   If you're not careful, you also wind up with things like inconsistent or conflicting triggering events, or inapplicable trigger events that may cause problems as well.

Another trade-off is that larger buckets necessarily become more general in terms of title and description, so the bigger your buckets, the less useful they are in identifying particular items for purposes of retrieval or other management; so if you go big bucket the need for good indexing and metadata becomes more important.

The more complex your records and your legal environment, the more difficulty you have controlling these and other issues; particularly  if you retention schedule reaches out to jurisdictions such as the EU that may have laws very different from and conflicting with US law. In some cases it may be necessary to make country–specific exceptions, or to carve out relatively  granular records series on the schedule to accommodate unique circumstances  and legal requirements.

So, going big bucket, you have to do analysis along the way and as you scoop up those buckets into bigger buckets, track these issues, until eventually you arrive at the point where you're starting to make compromises that are unacceptable to you. At that point your buckets are as big as you can reasonably make them without carving out exceptions of one sort or another. After you've carved out those exceptions, you can again make your buckets bigger until again the point where compromises that must be made to go bigger are unacceptable to you.

Best regards,

John
John Montaña 
Montaña & Associates
29 Parsons Road
Landenberg Pennsylvania 19350
610-255-1588
484-653-8422 mobile
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www.montana-associates.com
twitter: @johncmontana

			

On Sep 19, 2011, at 11:35 AM, Martin, Deborah L wrote:

> We are considering moving to big buckets for our retention schedules to reduce the current several hundred schedules to something more manageable.  Comments, lessons learned, tips, suggestions from anyone that's been through this process would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> Deb Martin
> R&CM RIM Operations
> Lockheed Martin
> 509-376-3771
> [log in to unmask]
> 


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