The Documents That Belonged to a Person, Not the Organisation
The organisation's most important documents didn't really belong to the organisation. They belonged to the people who were managing them.
The situation
The conversation started with a straightforward question: could we help a small organisation get its Microsoft 365 environment tidied up before a governance review?
But when we started looking at how information was actually stored and managed, what we found was a problem that had nothing to do with tidiness.
This isn't unusual. It's arguably the default state of most small organisations that haven't consciously designed their information governance.
What happened
A staff member had managed several years of important correspondence and agreements
They left. Their account was closed in the normal way
No structured handover of the documents they'd been managing had ever happened
Documents were recoverable — but only because the organisation acted quickly and had a competent IT provider
The recovery process took time and created unnecessary anxiety ahead of a review that should have been straightforward.
The underlying issue wasn't the leaver. It was that nobody had ever made an active decision about where important information should live. The path of least resistance — keeping things where they were easiest to manage in the moment — had been followed consistently, because nobody had designed a better path.
When information governance isn't designed deliberately, it gets designed by accident. And accidental information governance tends to look like this: critical documents in personal accounts, permissions that have drifted from what was intended, no clear retention policy, and a growing dependence on specific individuals to know where things are.
Cloud storage and good information governance are not the same thing
A file in someone's personal OneDrive is technically in the cloud. It's also inaccessible to everyone else, and doesn't survive the closure of that person's account.
"Do we have our documents?"
"Could we find our documents tomorrow if the person who manages them wasn't available?"
The fix
A defined home for every category
A simple, clear structure in SharePoint — not elaborate, not over-engineered, just consistent.
Permissions reviewed and reset
Access was set to reflect who actually needed it — not who had inherited it by accident.
An offboarding checklist
Any future departure now includes a document handover step before accounts are closed.
Two pages of guidance
Replacing what had previously been an unspoken assumption that everyone would figure it out.
The lesson
If a document matters to the organisation, it should be stored somewhere the organisation can always reach it — regardless of who created it or who's currently responsible for it. It's one of the more straightforward things to fix, and significantly easier to address before a governance review than during one.
Does this sound familiar?
If any of this resonates — the wrong versions, the chasing, the tools nobody quite trusts — it's worth a conversation. Most of the problems we fix are more straightforward than they feel from the inside.
No obligation. No hard sell. If it's not the right fit, I'll tell you.
