Google Drive Gameplan

Owned by Luka Mirosevic
Last updated: Sept 30, 2021 by Peter Riegler (Unlicensed)
5 min read

Status: Live

Google Drive Gameplan

Activity (=project) Folder Template

  • Activity: e.g. software project, design project, etc.

    • Quotes: Offers, estimates, quotes, etc. all go in here.

    • Legal: Any legal document that we're discussing

      • SDA: software development agreement. There are other names for this like "framework agreement", "consulting agreement", "professional services agreement", regardless what the instance is called, they should all live in here.

      • NDA: non disclosure agreement

      • GDPR: GDPR contracts

    • Binding: Legal documents that are binding and signed by the customer. These are intentionally hoisted to the root level to make these easy to find.

    • Incoming Materials: These are things that the customer sends us, e.g. legacy codebase, marketing materials, corporate identity guides. Everything that comes from the customer should live in here, except if we "accept it" and the file graduates to become part of our Requirements & Specs

    • Requirements & Specs: These are things that we create, typically in software projects, like sketches, or user story lists, etc.

      • Performance Specification: if there is a formal spec, it goes in here

      • Requirements: user stories, acceptance criteria, customer wireframes etc.

      • Content

        • Photography

        • Copy

        • Fonts

        • Icons

      • Whiteboard shots

      • Test Materials: e.g. qr codes, sample images, test protocol lists.

    • Billing:

      • Invoices: the docx. version of all invoices. Maybe an invoice overview Excel file if that is needed goes here too. The final invoice pdf goes into the "Accounting" Drive, and the invoices here should be considered informative only.

      • Dunning: aka "Mahnungen" in German. Same story as for invoices, just the .docx version.

      • Reports: if we send hourly worklog reports (or similar) to customers.

      • Statements: big companies sometimes need their bookkeeping account confirmed and we need to produce statements.

    • Design: Anything to do with the broad category of design goes in here

      • UX: sketches, wireframes, pictures of whiteboard sessions

      • Product Design: UI design basically, e.g. Xd files, Sketch files, of user interfaces, they all live in here.

      • Photography: Files coming out of a photography process like raws, edited, shortlists, etc. (not photos that the customer sent us).

      • 3D: Files produced during 3d work

      • Animation: After Effects files

      • Branding: logo design, business cards, invoice template, etc. A website design wouldn't be here, that would fall more under Product Design.

      • Video: clips, edits, exports, etc.

    • Artifacts: artifacts like data reports, app builds (.ipa, .apk), or test report.

    • Backups: any kind of backup file. This is different to Archive in that Backups are known to be valuable, whereas Archive are things that are probably not valuable.

    • Archive: Things that we don't need but don't quite want to delete, we can put into here.

Here is a template google drive with all mentioned folders:

Rules

  • Folder structure & naming:

    • Each Activity gets its own shared Google Drive folder.

    • Activities can be related to each other and sometimes files span multiple activities. Conceptually, this (the Activities that belong togethere) are called an Activity Group. You can make a drive for the Activity Group. For example if you have a customer like POS with many projects, we can make one Drive called "POS" for POS Solutions GmbH (= this would be the Activity Group) and a Drive for each project (= Activity) like "POSident", "FotoIdent" or "Scan&Sign". And then you could store the stuff that's common across all projects in the "POS" Drive.

    • Project folders should be named according to this scheme: “<client> <project>“, for example “Red Bull Pictionary“ or “POS PhotoIdent“

      • Special case for Sales: Potential deals can be thought of as an activity, however they should NOT get their own drive, instead they should live inside the 9Y-Deals Drive. Once they get upgraded to a project, create a Shared Drive and move the contents over and delete the (now empty) folder inside 9Y-Deals.

    • Give meaningful filenames. Avoid SCAN12369813786123.pdf. Files should be searchable. Yes, that means you have to rename a file when you scan something or when a client sends you a file with a useless filename.

    • If you need to add dates into filenames, use one of these date formats: 2020-04-18 or 20200418

    • If you need lightweight versioning of files, add a v1, v2, etc. suffix. Don't invent different suffixing schemes like "var1", or "ver2", or "-a" or "new". This is only suited for lightweight versioning. For high value files that change often: use proper version control (e.g. git, Abstract, Creative Cloud, etc.)

    • Please don't invent your own schemes like the following. To individuals they are certainly helpful, but in a team they cause chaos (this is an example of a local optimisation).

      • _temp

      • 01-abc

      • etc.

    • Stick to the folder structure template as much as you can. But it's OK to break away from the template when it makes sense. The above structure is not going to cover all cases, expand it with common sense, e.g. if you are preparing an MSA contract, then make a new folder for it.

    • Always group files into folders. Don't just leave random files dangling in the root. Even if you only have 1 file, make a folder for it with a descriptive name. Creating a folder and naming it something meaningful gives others helpful context.

    • Don't overengineer folder structures. Try to by default keep the folder hierarchies shallow. And once a folder starts to grow past 15 or so files, it's probably time to subdivide those into their own subfolders. Do this organically as folders grow.

  • Tooling:

    • Make sure your Google Drive desktop client is working. Never copy stuff to your desktop to work on, just work directly on the files inside Drive. If you are on a metered/slow internet connection, temporarily "pause syncing". And then resume it when you want the files to sync.

  • Access permissions and sharing:

    • The default access permission for each Drive is: core-team@9y.co (content manager) and management@9y.co (manager) permissions.

    • Some Drives might be locked down further depending on the circumstances.

    • Only share subfolders inside a Shared Drive with external parties (e.g. client or freelancers). When sharing a folder with externals, always add the suffix -ext signal this, and then share that one.

  • Workflow:

    • Don't keep notes in Drive (apart maybe from random "paper scraps"). Notes should live either in Hubspot (pre-deal stage for sales) or Confluence (everything else).

    • Never duplicate the same file across multiple locations. If multiple locations could apply, pick the best one and put it there.

    • Mirror the Activity name across the following tools: Drive folder, Slack Channel, Confluence space, Hubspot deal, Jira Account. Jira Account should definitely map 1-1 to the Activity name, the Jira project on the other hand will usually also mirror 1-1 but might not always especially with bigger projects which tend to get split into multiple Activites.

 

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