Archiving with Cross Functional Teams
Does anyone have a best practice to share for archiving? We have interdisciplinary marketing teams working on projects and cannot decide if it's best to archive projects by having a separate archive folder by region or to move every completed project to the "completed jobs" folder and then run reports to gather data.
Thoughts?
Hey Andrea, great question. This is more of a personal preference for a lot of people at the moment. I like to create an Archive Folder, and then Subfolders within to move completed items. Then when I run a report I can select specific Folders depending on the level/Specific Projects I want in the Report.
I'm also interested in finding out what others are doing though so thanks for asking 👍
Hi Andrea,
This is a tricky one and something I've tinkered with for a while. Here's where I've landed with our marketing team. Hopefully you can find something helpful!
In short, I have an archive folder that mimics the architecture of my active folders. So when a project is completed, I untag it from it's active folder and tag the same archive folder.
However, there are some cases in which a different department (or team) is also working on this project and thus has tags on it as well. In that case, I only touch my tags so that their archiving convention will not be altered if they don't happen to use the same convention as me.
As projects are completed I move them over to the archive folder. To make even it more intuitive for myself, I've color coded all the archive folders black so that when the tag comes up to add, it is clear to me that it's the archive tag, not the active tag.
Here's an example:
Brand A (over arching team folder)
Identity & Image (folder, a 'bucket' in which projects live)
Photography
Campaigns
Digital Advt
etc.
2018 Archive Brand A
2018 Compl - Identity & Image
2018 Compl - Photography
2018 Compl - Campaigns
2018 Compl - Digital Advt
etc.
It is a bit tedious at first, but I set up a template of the entire folder structure, so that at the end of the year I simply duplicate the template, rename it with a 2019 Compl prefix and voila, next year's completed structured.
Perrie
I have done the something very similar to what Perrie mentioned above. We have three main sections as we prepare for our final launch - 1. Opportunities 2. Active Projects 3. Z Archive
Inside the active and archive folders is a structure that is separated by client (we are not using the archive year yet). As a project closes, we will move it to the appropriate client folder in the archive section.
Seems to be working great for testing and it makes it VERY easy to report out on items by client regardless of the status of the project.