When this client started with Digital Ninja the brand was just being defined fully. This real estate development company had been operating for a few years successfully, but had built up by strong relationships, hard work, and incremental success. As they moved to grow they decided to bring a strong brand to market. They needed to start and migrate to Google Workspace from a variety of free Gmail accounts, and several sources of Google Drive files that were commingled with personal files. Their team was growing and a new operations director was hired, in part, to centralize Standard Operating Procedures.

Digital Ninja has seen this scenario a lot over the years. We’ve developed a 3 working meeting solution. Working with the director of operations we meet to discuss the destination of the files first. We make sure we don’t bring forward disorganization, but rather leverage the new account as an opportunity to clean up and do better. We also help change the mindset that Google Drive can be a project that finishes, and instead focus on how to manage it so it is easy to maintain as it requires ongoing maintenance.

We develop folder hierarchy, naming conventions for departments, folders, and files, and help by training the director on configuration. This allows the organization to meet, decide on, and complete the development of a company folder system. For this organization we focused heavily on standard operating procedures as they had an office staff, field staff, tenants, and supporting services like property management agencies. 

Once we configure the destination of files we move to setting permissions for user access. Our working meeting helps the administration and managers understand the access and security rules and set them confidently. Leveraging Shared Drives allows us to make sure the right team has the right access and permission to use files without having access to finances and unnecessary client data.

Throughout this project we taught their team how to leverage advanced functions in Google Docs, and understand how to use Groups to assign permissions. We leverage a Google Doc to document the entire procedure with the client so that the system we build has instructions, and the ability to be maintained over time by future team members and other service providers.