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What you can expect from this best practice:

• Develop specific guidelines for the use of the team shared drive

• Define the Master Folders in your team shared drive along with core Sub-Folders

• Provide instruction for consistent naming of files

• Identify the best ways for your team to use email effectively

• Understand how the CRM fits with shared drives and emails

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To get an understanding about how best to engineer your advisory practice information, review General Guidelines for Advisory Teams.

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Team Shared Drives

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1. Delegate the responsibility of overseeing the team shared drive to one person on the team. The coordinator will then initiate all the following steps in this process.

2. Carefully review and share with the team the 6 Guidelines for Shared Folders to begin getting the team on the same page.

3. Begin by mapping out the Master Folders on the shared drive.

   • Refer to Setting Up Your Master Folders

4. Create the Sub-Folders within each Master folder.

   • Refer to Setting Up Your Client Folders

   • Refer to Setting Up Your Practice Management Folders

5. At the next Weekly Team Meeting, outline exactly how the shared drive has been set up.

6. Instruct the team to begin moving their existing information to one the appropriate Master and Sub-Folders, which should accommodate 80% of the information being used by the team.

7. Determine what is left in the 20% of the information and work collaboratively with the team to create additional Master and Sub-Folders to effectively organize this information.

8. Regularly monitor the team use of the shared drive.

9. Set a trigger to remind the team about the “Annual Spring Clean” of the team shared drive. 

Outlook (Email)

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1. Carefully review the Guidelines for Outlook (Email).

2. Discuss the Guidelines at your next Weekly Team Meeting.

3. Ensure everyone is following the Guidelines.

4. Ensure everyone is using the proper email signature for the team.

Contact Management Systems

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1. Carefully review the Guidelines for Contact Management Systems.

2. Move to the next best practice, which covers full CRM Integration in great detail.

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