Ten network drives, eighty people, and no agreement about where anything goes.
I was asked to move ACRO's files off its old network drives and into SharePoint. Copying them over as-is would have just moved the mess, so the real job was building a structure everyone would actually use and benefit from.
What I walked into
ACRO ran on more than ten mapped network drives, each one evolved independently, without structure or ownership. Everyone had department drives, personal folders and various shared spaces. Nobody had a clear picture of where to look.
Migrate department files off legacy network drives into SharePoint. Move fast where possible.
No information architecture existed to migrate into.
Engineering CAD deferred: it needs a PDM system, not SharePoint. Marketing media excluded. Wide range of tech comfort across staff. One engineering tool, RoboGuide, silently loses work on file paths over roughly 100 characters, so the new structure couldn't lengthen paths.
I started by asking people how they actually find things.
I didn't show up with a structure. I wanted to know how people actually worked, where files really lived, and what the mess was costing them. A 14-person survey went across Engineering, Sales, Admin, Machining, and Shop. Stakeholder meetings with department leads followed. Every mapped drive was inventoried: file types, ownership, and SharePoint readiness.
14 respondents across Engineering, Sales, Admin, Machining, and Shop. April 2026.
"I don't know where to look." Surfaced independently in every department, at every role level.
SolidWorks write conflicts cost 15 to 30 minutes per incident. Engineers asked for a PDM system by name, independently. That confirmed the decision to keep CAD out of scope.
A request as basic as "our most profitable jobs over the last 5 years" could not be compiled. The data existed. It was spread across drives nobody owned, in formats nobody agreed on.
"Even after working at ACRO for 10 months, it is challenging to find documents that I need to use fairly frequently like design standards."
Mechanical Engineering · Survey, April 2026
"Wanted to know our most profitable jobs over the last 5 years. This cannot be compiled."
Sales · Survey, April 2026
- G: / T: · Sales files
- I: · Engineering tools & dept files
- J: · de facto company forms library
- K: · shared + personal foldersanti-pattern
- K:\nschilling · personal files in shared space
- ...a personal folder for nearly every employee
- L: · EPLAN electrical files
- Q: · SolidWorks library
- Z: · 400+ numbered engineering project folders
- Personal OneDrives · unmanaged
- Local drives & desktops
When a new employee asked where to save a file, every person gave a different answer, because everyone had worked out their own system.
- Resources · company-wide, self-service
- Forms & Templates
- HR Policies & Handbook
- Branding & Assets
- Safety Documentation
- Department Team Sites · operational
- HR
- Sales
- IT
- Administration
- Machine Shop
- Assembly & Service
- Purchasing & Shipping
- Controls Engineering
- Mechanical Engineering · non-CAD
- Engineering CAD → PDM system · separate project
Nobody has to guess which drive to check. If it's for the whole company, it's in Resources. If it's for one department, it's in that department's Team Site.
I kept it to one rule everyone could follow.
The real cost was ambiguity: people didn't know where to look, files got duplicated, and nobody could tell which version was current. So the structure is built on one rule. Company-wide files live in Resources. Department files live in that department's Team Site.
Departments were not asked to hand their files to someone else to organize. They got the destination structure and the responsibility to clean their own drives before migration. If I built the structure for each department, it wouldn't match how they actually work, and it certainly wouldn't persuade anyone to break old habits.
Live, and moving over one department at a time.
This case study is being written in real time. The architecture is designed and deployed, and department migrations are rolling out in phases. Adoption rates, time-to-find improvement, and the volume of "where is X?" requests will be logged here as the migration moves through the remaining departments.