A structured home for project content, and a register that runs itself
Tab & Shift Engineering Ltd. · SharePoint clean up and project register
| Prepared for | Prepared by | Date | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Priya Shah Director of Operations | Floor 16 Technologies | Jun 12, 2026 | v1.0 · For review |
| Evidence base | |||
| The Scan (Apr 17, 2026) · Content analysis of 520,000 files (Jun 5, 2026) · Six discovery sessions (Jun 1 to 10, 2026) | |||
What the content analysis found, where the content is going, and the design that follows. Forty-four sites replacing seventy-eight, everything older than the archive date kept read-only with its structure intact, and one register that every project starts from.
What discovery concluded
- The estate is smaller than it looks. 78 sites, but 34 are dormant, tests or duplicates, and 62% of the files predate the archive date agreed on May 8. The working set is about 128,000 files in 44 sites. The move fits in five weeks, not a quarter.
- Tab & Shift already numbers its projects. 242 of 340 project folders start with a TS-YY-NNN number, a sound scheme that was never required. The register extends a habit people already have rather than asking for a new one.
- The spreadsheet is the real front door. Every interviewee finds a project by opening the project list first and the folder second. So the register becomes the index: one row per project, with a link to its folder, its team and its job sheets.
- Six folder shapes cover nine projects in ten. The best-kept 40% of projects already share a layout. One standard of eight top-level folders, taken from those projects, fits what people actually file.
- Billing waits on paper. 1,100 job sheets a month arrive as phone photos and are typed into billing. Capturing them at source, against the register's project number, removes the retyping and the month-end chase. It follows the register in October.
- SharePoint takes this a long way, and then stops. The register, numbering, close-out, retention and dashboards are all inside what Tab & Shift already owns. CAD previews and offline field work are not, and the boundary is drawn plainly below.
What the content analysis found
Every figure here comes from a file-level inventory taken on Jun 5, 2026: 520,000 files with their details, 31,400 folders, 3,900 permission entries and 1,140 sharing links. No document was opened.
Four findings that shape the design
Everyone can edit the Projects site. "Everyone except external users" holds Edit at site level, so every project folder, including client contracts and fee proposals, is editable by all 90 staff. The new structure sets access by group from the start rather than fixing it afterwards.
Client sharing is mostly disciplined. Clients are invited as guests into a project team, and that pattern works. The Anyone links found in the Scan were closed in April. The design keeps client teams and makes them standard.
Project work is hiding in OneDrive. 11,200 deliverables (reports, calculations and drawings) are shared from personal OneDrives, mostly by four engineers. They move into the project folders before anyone leaves.
Storage is mostly photos. 0.52 TB of SharePoint content is site photos and video from crews, 81% of it older than the archive date. Photos move to the archive with their project; current ones stay in each project's Photos folder.
Practice already in place
These folder names recur across the best-kept projects. The vocabulary exists, so the standard builds on it rather than replacing it:
Target structure
Forty-four sites, down from seventy-eight
Communication sites for the functions that have a few authors and many readers. Team sites only where there is a working group or external guests, which means client projects and a handful of departments.
| Site | Type | What it holds | Consolidates from | Sites |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tab & Shift Home | Home site, communication | News, policies, navigation, the search page. No working documents. | Company Home, All Company, All Company (2) | 1 |
| Projects | Team site · Projects hub | One folder per internal project in the standard layout, indexed by the register. | Projects, Project Template, five per-project sites | 1 |
| Client project teams | Team site | One per active client project with guests, from a template, named EXT-TS-YY-NNN. | 52 teams, 22 still active | 22 |
| Bids and Proposals | Team site | Pursuits, approved past proposals, boilerplate. Pricing library restricted. | Bids and Proposals, Estimating, Estimating OLD | 1 |
| Engineering Standards | Communication · Engineering hub | Standards, standard details, calculation templates. One current version, one owner. | Three copies in Engineering, Drafting, Projects | 1 |
| Engineering Team | Team site | Working space for the engineering group. | Engineering, Drafting | 1 |
| Field Services | Team site | Crews, schedules, equipment, job sheet records. | Field Services, Survey Crew A and B, Equipment | 1 |
| Finance | Team site, restricted | Accounting, payroll (restricted library), audit. | Finance, Payroll folder | 1 |
| People and Culture | Team site, restricted | Employee files restricted; policies readable by all staff through Tab & Shift Home. | HR Team, HR Records 2019 | 1 |
| Leadership and Board | Team site, restricted | Board papers, legal, strategy. | Leadership Team | 1 |
| Health, Safety and Quality | Communication | Safety program, observations list, quality manual, records policy. | Health and Safety, Quality, Safety Committee | 1 |
| Business Services | Communication · Corporate hub | IT, facilities, vehicles, procurement, onboarding. | IT, Vehicles, Office Admin | 1 |
| Marketing | Communication | Approved collateral, case studies, brand. Labeled Public where approved. | Marketing, Marketing 2019 | 1 |
| Department teams | Team site | Seven working teams that are active and owned, kept as they are. | Unchanged | 7 |
| Training | Communication | Courses, certifications, toolbox talks. | Training, Toolbox Talks | 1 |
| Archive | Communication, read-only | One library per legacy source site, original folders kept. Restricted libraries stay restricted. | Everything older than the archive date | 1 |
| Total | 44 |
Thirty-four sites retire
- Test Site
- Test Site 2
- Demo Team
- IT Sandbox
- Project Template OLD
- All Company (2)
- Marketing 2019
- Estimating OLD
- Drafting Temp
- Holiday Party 2022
- Safety Committee 2018
- Survey Crew B
- Old Intranet
- Scanner Uploads
- Harbor Road Bid 2020
- Lakeview Pursuit
- Summer Students 2021
- Office Move 2020
- Equipment Old
- Vendor Docs Temp
Plus 14 client project teams whose projects finished before 2023. Their content moves to the archive with its folders intact; the teams are deleted only after the owner confirms the move.
Two structural calls worth knowing
Internal projects share one site; client projects get their own team. One Projects site means one permission model, one register and search across every project without extra machinery. Client projects with external guests stay as separate teams, because a guest on one project must never see another. The register links to both, so nobody has to know which kind a project is.
Standards live with engineering, not with projects. Durable engineering knowledge (standards, details, calculation templates) sits in one site with one owner. Project deliverables sit with the project. Without that split, every project copies the standards, which is how Tab & Shift came to have three different versions.
Where the content goes
Content untouched since Jan 1, 2023 moves to the archive with its structure intact. Duplicates are resolved first. Everything newer lands in a destination in the new structure, inside the folder that applies its labels.
Also: 38,400 duplicates removed first (0.21 TB), and 31,600 current personal files that stay in OneDrive (0.08 TB).
Share of 520,000 files. Deep Sky marks the working set: the content people use every day and the content AI will later draw on.
| Source | Files | To new structure | To archive | Duplicates | Lands in |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Projects | 214,000 | 70,000 | 122,000 | 22,000 | Projects, client teams |
| Project Archive | 61,000 | 0 | 58,500 | 2,500 | Archive |
| 52 client and department teams | 31,000 | 14,800 | 14,400 | 1,800 | 22 client teams, 7 department teams |
| Field Services and survey crews | 22,000 | 9,000 | 11,800 | 1,200 | Field Services |
| Finance | 14,200 | 5,800 | 7,900 | 500 | Finance |
| Bids, Estimating | 9,800 | 4,100 | 5,100 | 600 | Bids and Proposals |
| Engineering Standards (three copies) | 9,400 | 2,100 | 2,100 | 5,200 | Engineering Standards |
| HR Team, HR Records 2019 | 7,900 | 2,600 | 5,300 | 0 | People and Culture |
| All other sites | 14,700 | 8,400 | 6,100 | 200 | Various |
| OneDrive | 136,000 | 11,200 | 88,800 | 4,400 | Project folders; old files stay in place under retention |
| Total | 520,000 | 128,000 | 322,000 | 38,400 |
The other 31,600 OneDrive files are current personal work and stay where they are. Old OneDrive files are not moved: they leave the working set in place, under the retention policy, and their owners can still open them.
Why archive rather than delete
Nothing is deleted in this plan except exact duplicates, and only with the site owner's sign-off. Tab & Shift's retention schedule, signed on May 22, sets ten years after project close for project records, and many of the archived projects have no closed date yet. Archiving gets the working set clean without asking anyone to make an irreversible call. The archive keeps original folders, so people recognize where things are, and it stays in search, so nothing is lost from view.
The project register
Filing works for most of the business. Projects need more, because a project has a number, a client, a status, a value, a set of people and a date that starts the ten-year retention clock. That is a row of data, not a folder.
The idea the whole thing rests on
A project is a row, and the folder hangs off it. The register holds the facts; the folder holds the files; the job sheets point at the row. Billing, the Monday operations meeting and the monthly board figures all read the same rows, so there is one set of numbers instead of four spreadsheets.
| Number | Project | Client | Status | Manager | Value | Links |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TS-26-041 | Riverside pump station inspection | Copy of Copy Water | Active | Ahmed Karim | $84,000 | Folder · Team · 31 job sheets |
| TS-26-037 | Circular Reference hangar slab assessment | Circular Reference Aviation | Active | Hannah Brooks | $46,500 | Folder · 12 job sheets |
| TS-25-118 | Autosave depot retrofit design | Autosave Transit | Complete | Ahmed Karim | $212,000 | Folder · Team |
| TS-19-022 | Harbor Road culvert survey | County roads | Closed · Mar 2020 | (former staff) | $18,200 | Archive |
Illustrative rows. Every name is made up.
Numbering that already exists
The register allocates the next TS-YY-NNN number when a project is created, so nobody types one and none is reused. The 98 folders without a number get one during the import, and the old folder name is kept as a column so people can still search by it.
Complete and closed are different
Complete means the work is done. Closed means the records are closed, and it is the date the ten-year retention clock runs from. Keeping them apart stops finished projects from sitting open for years, which is how 212 finished projects came to have no closed date.
Imported projects say so
All 340 rows arrive from the spreadsheet and the folder names marked "Imported, unverified". They are findable and linked from day one, but a project manager confirms each active one before it counts in billing or board figures. Without that flag the register would inherit the spreadsheet's errors on its first day.
How far this goes inside SharePoint
Tab & Shift already owns the platform, the licenses and the tenant. Nothing below needs a second product to administer or renew. The list is ordered by how far up it goes, and the last entries are where it stops.
- 01A clean, governed home for every projectStandard folders, access by group, labels applied by the folder a file lands in.Fully
- 02A register with automatic numberingOne row per project, numbers allocated in sequence, never typed, never reused.Fully
- 03Status, close-out and retention from one dateClosing a project starts its retention clock and sets the folder read-only.Fully
- 04Job sheets from crew phones into the registerA form against the project number, photos to the project folder, a weekly billing export.Fully
- 05Dashboards from the registerActive projects, value by status, job sheets awaiting billing, projects missing a manager.Fully
- 06Working with no signal in the fieldCrews can complete the form offline in the mobile app and it sends when signal returns. Opening project files offline needs them synced in advance.Partly
- 07Formal drawing revision controlAchievable on the same register later. Not in this scope, and not asked for in discovery.Partly
- 08Previewing CAD and point-cloud filesSharePoint cannot preview them. The issued PDF is the previewable copy.No
- 09Replacing billing in the accounting systemThe register feeds the accounting system an export. It does not replace it.No
The measure of success is not whether this beats a project management product. It is whether a project manager can find any project, its files and its status faster than by opening the spreadsheet, on the first try. That is the bar each stage is tested against.
A working prototype, not a specification
A clickable prototype of the register has been built on Tab & Shift's own project list. It shows that the concepts in this document behave as described: the register grid, a project page with its folder and job sheets, number allocation and the close-out step. It does not establish which fields Tab & Shift's project managers actually need, and it should not be read as though it does.
Short sessions before the register is scoped
Who
- Priya Shah, as the process owner
- Two project managers
- Marcus Chen, for billing
- Luis Ortega, for the crews
What we ask
- Walk us through the last project you opened, start to finish
- How do you know a project is finished
- What does billing need from a job sheet
- What do you look for that you cannot find
What it produces
- The fields that earn their place
- Status rules that match how work runs
- The billing export format
- A scoped build, not an assumed one
Delivery sequence
Two phases, eight weeks
Eight weeks from Monday, Jun 22, complete by Friday, Aug 14, 2026. Phase one puts every file where it belongs and retires what is dead. Phase two builds the register on top of it. Job sheet capture follows in October, once the register is live.
What Tab & Shift does, and when
| Action | Who | Weeks |
|---|---|---|
| Review the disposition of every site and library. We provide the mapping with a proposed destination for each; Tab & Shift confirms or corrects. | Site owners, Priya Shah | 1 and 2 |
| Confirm which copy of each duplicate set is current, where we cannot tell from the details alone. | Site owners | 2 |
| Register sessions: four short conversations. | Priya Shah, two PMs, Marcus Chen, Luis Ortega | 4 |
| Acceptance test on the new structure. | Six named testers | 5 |
| Confirm the 96 active projects in the register. | Project managers | 7 and 8 |
| Training session and handover. | All project managers | 8 |
Checkpoints
End of week 2: structure and dispositions. The site design and where each library's content goes. This is the only checkpoint where a delay moves the rest of the schedule, because both moves are built on it.
End of week 5: phase one. Content is in place, search returns the right answers, and the old sites are retired. Register scope agreed from the sessions.
End of week 8: phase two. A project is created, numbered, filed, completed and closed inside the register, and billing reads from it.
These are conversations, not paperwork.