Going from a standard Google Drive, even a well organized one, to a Shared Drive in your Google Workspace account can seem like an insurmountable task. Or, at least a tedious one. We often find clients facing this point of the organizations growth, and with a little bit of strategy and procedure they can leverage this point as a great opportunity to get more efficient, organized, and secure.
In this example, we’ll look at a growing real estate syndication firm. They have grown their portfolio and their staff, and now are reaching a point where the development and use of standard operating procedures has become a top priority. They recognized that their steady growth will lead to much more volume of work, and could easily get to a point of overwhelm if procedures weren’t locked down.
Shared Drives was the perfect solution. They’ve been using the Google Workspace for quite some time, and their director of operations was eager to leverage the tools they already paid to have for the organization.
Note: Having a dedicated and focused leader on your team is essential for a file organization project to work.
In order to help an organization like this we have built a Google Drive project that our clients can purchase that consists of a series of meetings over 30 days to help an organization develop folder structures, user access settings, naming conventions, and a strategy for the team to use the files easily.
We leveraged this digital ninja service and took it deeper with a training on developing Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) with an advanced use of Google Docs, Sheets, and Forms. This framework of SOP development enabled the team to rapidly develop and deploy new SOPs.
Focusing on moving from Google Drive to Shared Drives is a great opportunity to build momentum and flow in an organizations day to day working environment. Shared Drives requires work up front as you have to think departmentally, think carefully about user access, and develop some naming conventions. But, the return is a much more organized and secure digital file environment.
Paring that with SOP development using Google Docs, Sheets, and Forms means you are truly leveraging more of what Google Workspace offers for your subscription costs.
