Spring Cleaning

After more than nine feet of snow in Boston, I saw something I haven’t seen a while this week. My lawn. And it wasn’t a pretty sight. All that snow brought gravel, matted leaves, trash and who knows what else on to my property. 

So it’s time for spring cleaning. 

And while I’m cleaning up at home, I figured it’s a good time to do some cleaning at work as well. Here’s my short list for spring cleaning for tech groups. 

Document library: One of the things that we always have a requirement for a document management system is version control. But even the best system can’t protect against that most stubborn of enemies, bad user habits. Take a moment to go through your document library this spring and purge duplicate documents, synchronize versions and reestablish naming conventions. 

Email lists: Have you spent time taking a hard look at the people on your email lists? When we’ve done similar exercises, it’s not unusual to find 20% of the people have moved on. 

Public Web site: One of the things I hear most on public web sites is “put it on the home page.” The result is often a home page that has too much clutter to be truly useful. Go through it with a critical eye and eliminate what’s not needed. 

Legal documents: Are your bylaws up to date? Have all members signed relevant documents?  When I was hired by an association in the mid 90’s, my first task was to update the bylaws. I noticed that the official means of notification for the annual meeting was “telegraph.” Perhaps a change was in order… 

All these take a bit of time. But they’re a lot easier than picking up a rake in my yard.