One thing you can do that will help your team immensely is to organize your design files and related documentation.  This one thing will help reduce your stress level immensely, especially when you have to go back and look at those files after you haven’t worked on the project for a while.  Thanks for letting me share my experiences and thoughts with you.

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Cheers,

Montie Roland

President

Montie Design

———– Transcript —————————————

Audio File: 2014 Feb 26 – How to Organize Your Project.mp3

 

Good morning. My name is Montie Roland. I’m with Montie Design in Morrisville, North Carolina.

And this morning what I’d like to talk about is how to structure your project from a file standpoint, from an organizational standpoint.

Montie Design is a full-service design firm in Morrisville, North Carolina. We provide industrial design, mechanical engineering and prototyping capability on-demand to help you move your project from concept to ready-for-the-shipping dock.

It’s always good to have processes and procedures. And, of course, any company can take that too far. And the counterpoint is if you take it too far, then you get that big company mentality and you’re painful to deal with. But, a lot of these processes and procedures benefit the company. And I’ll be the first to admit that as we’ve grown . . . I’ve not been the biggest proponent of procedure and process, because as a small group, you get everybody reading your mind and you don’t have to worry about it. But this changes as you have more employees, because of different levels of capabilities. You have to keep retraining. And so all of a sudden, it’s more important to have policies and procedures just to make life easier for your staff.

It’s also important when you think about interns. You got somebody that’s going to be there for a limited amount of time – you want to get them in, get them trained and get them some experience, and then also get some work product completed so it’s a win-win for both the employer and for the intern.

So let’s just dive in. A lot of these topics I’ve covered in past podcasts were much more higher level. And so, in this case though I want to dive in and let’s talk about this in detail. So, first thing is that, when you think about how do you organize your files, you want to have a place that everybody can get to. So, let’s say, let’s call it the \Z drive. And on the \Z drive, you have a space that is a shared working space. Now, what you need is you need a set of rules so everybody knows what to do. On a project where there’s more than one contributor, you really want to have a gatekeeper. So the gatekeeper is in charge of files that go in certain locations. One is that files that go in current design and the other is files that go in your release directories.

So, let’s kind of roll through those directories so I don’t get too far ahead of myself. The current design . . . well, back up. So, we’ve got a project directory, and let’s say our project is Zigzis (spell that one). And so I’ve created a directory, in this case; maybe for the client of Zigzis. And then I have to make decision. Is it likely I’m going to have multiple projects from this client? Or is it likely that I might just have one? Or that not now. So maybe what I’ll do is that I’m thinking that this might be a repeat client. So let’s say that, if it is, then I’m going to want to have a directory for each project that we do for that client. So, we’ve got a directory called “Clients” and then the client name; and then underneath that, let’s say Project A is the vertical inductor. So we create a directory called “Vertical Indu