Mike Oustamanolakis, PhD

Five companies, one rule

A failing programme got back on track once the board and I agreed what to cut.

Problem

Five companies and their board shared clients, contracts and patents, and had no shared way to name a document or find one.

The programme meant to fix it was failing under its previous manager, and the board was close to cancelling it.

What I did

  • Agreed the cuts with the board, line by line, before anything else.
  • Put the answer in the file name. One rule for every company: whose it is, what kind, and when.
  • Made the search narrow, and added one shared field showing what each company was working on.

Result

~2 hours

a week finding documents, down from 15–20. My estimate, combined across the group.

Adopted immediately. The client dropped several recurring meetings a week, and duplicated work stopped.

BeforeAfter
No shared way to name or file documents across five companies and a board
One naming rule: a file’s name says whose it is, what it is, and when
15–20 hours a week searching, calling and meeting about documents
About 2 hours a week
Companies in the group duplicating work without knowing
“Active projects” visible to all: duplicated work stopped
A programme failing under its previous manager
Back on track, and adopted immediately

Hours: estimate, combined across the group.

The search, re-created from the original design. Company and project names are invented.

Who

Client
The board of a group of five companies
Region
Macau, Taiwan, Guangzhou and Hong Kong: four legal systems
People
About 50, of whom about 40 in mainland China and Macau
My role
Brought in to rescue the programme, and redesigned how the group filed and found its documents.

The situation

Five companies and their board shared clients, contracts, patents and other intellectual property. They had no shared way to name a document or find one. The board had commissioned a shared system to fix that, and under its previous manager the programme was failing: deadlines were missed, teams were building different things, the shared folder was mismanaged, and there was friction between the companies. The board was close to cancelling it. I was brought in to rescue it.

Who it was for

About 50 people across the group, about 40 of them in mainland China and Macau. Six people, one for each company and one for the board, added documents. The client chose the two users to design for.

The two users the client chose to design for.

What I found

The team sat in four places under four legal systems, and each group wanted something different.

Four places, four legal systems, three sets of expectations.

The documents had the same problem as the team. Nothing in a file said which company it belonged to, what kind of document it was, or when it was signed, so people asked, called and held meetings to find out. Two companies could work on the same thing without knowing.

What I decided

  1. Started with the people who held the budget. I went through the brief with the board line by line, and we removed what they did not need. Agreeing the cuts early is what got the programme back on track.
  2. Gave each team its own brief. Each could see what it owned inside the shared plan. We held stand-ups every three days, under strict confidentiality.
  3. Put the answer in the file name. Company, type, date, sequence, then plain words. Every company uses the same rule, so the name says whose a document is and what kind it is before anyone opens it.
  4. Made the search narrow. Choosing a family shows its sub-types. Each result shows where and when a document was signed, and by whom: a company, an individual or a government.
  5. Added one field everyone can see. “Active projects” showed each company what the others were working on.
The naming rule that makes the search work: every company files the same way.

The screens

Three screens, re-created from the original designs, with the reasoning marked on them.

One result

  1. The code comes first. Company, family, date and sequence, the same as the file name, so a result and a file can be matched by eye.
  2. Company, type and status are links. Each one narrows the search to everything like it.
  3. File type and a description. The accountant can confirm it is the right agreement before opening it.
  4. Where and when it was signed. The group worked under four legal systems, so the place of signing matters as much as the date.
Re-created from the original design. The company name is invented and the description is a placeholder.

Filters that narrow

  1. Choose a family. Five choices, the same five letters as in the file name.
  2. Its sub-types appear only then. Nobody faces every kind of document at once.
  3. Every filter shows its count. People can see what is there before they choose.
Re-created from the original design, with sample counts. Repeated chips in the original mock-up are left out.

Five families

  1. One letter for each family. It is the second part of every file name, so files sort by kind on any computer.
  2. Every kind of document has one home. A patent and a supplier contract are both Legal, so one filter finds either.
The grouping from the original category list.

The objection

People pushed back against renaming thousands of existing files. I specified the requirements for a Python script that renamed them automatically. It also cleared years of accumulated filename problems.

The company name is invented.

What changed

Time spent across the group each week searching for documents and meeting about them: 15 to 20 hours before, about 2 hours after. Hours a week, across the group searching for documents, and calls and meetings about them Before 15–20 After about 2 Outlined part of the bar: the range of the estimate.
Estimate, combined across the group.

What this case cannot say