Four storage silos became one intranet.
A 30-person consultancy kept its files in four places at once — a file server, personal OneDrives, email and an abandoned SharePoint 2013 site. New joiners spent their first week just learning where things were.
Four places to look, and no right answer.
The firm's work lived in four systems at once. Current client files sat on the office file server. Drafts lived in personal OneDrives, shared by link and invisible to anyone who didn't have one. Email had become the archive of record — the safest way to find a final version was to search for the message that sent it. And an abandoned SharePoint 2013 site still held older material nobody trusted enough to use or confident enough to delete.
None of it was anyone's fault — each silo had been the sensible choice at the time it was adopted. But every search now started with a guess about which system to look in, the same document could exist in several of them with no way to tell which copy was current, and the real index of where things lived was in the heads of the longest-serving staff.
The cost showed up most clearly at the edges of the team. New joiners spent their first week just learning where things were — not doing client work, but building the mental map the silos made necessary. That was the point where "we'll sort out the file mess later" stopped being a plan.
A two-week audit, then one obvious home for everything.
No big-bang replatform. The engagement went from audit to roadmap in two weeks, then rebuilt around a structure the firm already understood: its teams and its clients.
We inventoried all four silos — what lived where, who actually used it, what was duplicated and what could be retired — and turned the findings into a roadmap the partners could act on.
A new SharePoint hub architecture organized the way the firm actually thinks — by team and by client — so every document has exactly one obvious home, and so does every new piece of work.
Content is tagged by client and document type, so search finds files by what they are rather than by where someone happened to save them. The question "where is it?" became "what is it?"
A single page covering naming, ownership and where new work goes — short enough that people actually read it, and clear enough that the structure survives contact with a busy week.
What changed.
No vanity metrics — these are the three numbers the engagement was measured on.
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