Copied file server structure
Redesign around how teams work now. This is the change that produces the largest daily time saving and it is rarely prioritised.
SharePoint · Audit
Information architecture audit
Twenty checks on whether your file structure is helping people work or quietly costing them an hour a week.
Why run this
What this checklist is for
Most growing businesses migrated a file server into SharePoint, kept the folder structure, and inherited a decade of decisions made for a different tool.
The cost is invisible because it is distributed: a few minutes per person per day looking for things, and nobody adds it up.
Run it with
Managing director or operations lead
And with
Whoever administers Microsoft 365
And with
Two or three people from different teams
0 of 0 complete · 0%
The checklist
20 checks, in the order we would run them
Tick only what you can genuinely evidence today. An item you intend to do is not an item you have done, and scoring yourself generously here only produces a comfortable number and an uncomfortable project.
Section 1
Structure
Whether the shape matches how the business works.
Section 2
Access
Who can reach what, and whether that was decided.
Section 3
Findability
The test that matters most.
Section 4
Governance
Whether it stays usable.
What your score means
Read this against the number above
These bands are deliberately blunt. The middle band is where most organizations honestly sit, and it is a perfectly reasonable place to proceed from — provided the gaps are written down with owners rather than carried as optimism.
0–59%Significant gaps
Do not proceed yet. More than four in ten items are unaddressed, and the ones that fail here are usually the foundational ones that make everything after them harder.
60–84%Mostly ready, with known gaps
Proceed on a defined scope, with the outstanding items written into the plan as risks with owners and dates. This is the most common honest position.
85–100%Ready
The remaining gaps are small enough to handle during delivery rather than before it. Confirm the unticked items are genuinely minor rather than simply unexamined.
Your score highlights automatically as you tick items above. Nothing is saved, sent or tracked — refreshing the page clears it.
Closing the gaps
If you could not tick these, start here
The four items below are the ones whose absence causes the most trouble downstream. If your unticked items include any of these, they are worth addressing before the rest.
File-level permissions
Move to site or library level. File-level permissions are unmaintainable and produce access nobody can audit.
New starter cannot find things
This is your evidence. Whatever they could not find is where to start, and it makes the business case for you.
No owner
Name somebody. An information architecture without an owner degrades continuously and nobody notices until onboarding takes a week.
Want a second opinion on your score?
We will run the new-starter test with somebody who joined recently and give you the findings, which usually make the case for the work more effectively than any assessment.
Talk through your result Read the related guides We reply to every message within one business day.
Keep going
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