Fix the Mess: From SharePoint Chaos to Copilot Clarity

In this episode, Liza introduces the 5-Day SharePoint Reset, a fast, practical, and stress-free way to get your SharePoint environment under control—no massive overhaul required. Born from real workplace frustration and chaos (yes, including those dreaded "final_final_final" file names), this approach is tailored for busy teams dealing with inherited mess, deeply nested folders, and inconsistent practices.

You’ll learn:

• Why most SharePoint advice doesn’t work in the real world
• The rip-and-replace myth and how it sets teams up to fail
• What strategic improvements are and why they’re your best bet
• The five small daily actions that make a massive difference—starting with a five-minute scan
• How targeted changes to views, folders, metadata, and staging areas can instantly boost productivity
• The surprising way this reset also prepares you for Copilot Readiness

Liza shares real success stories from teams who went from digital chaos to clarity in just five days, and reveals how this reset lays the foundation for her upcoming course: Fix the Mess – SharePoint Cleanup for Real Workspaces. You'll also get a sneak peek at the Copilot Mini Assessment, designed to get your site Copilot-ready without the overwhelm.

🧰 Want to start your own reset?
 Download the 5-Day SharePoint Reset Starter Kit:
📍 resources.simplysharepoint.com

If SharePoint’s been slowing your team down, this episode is your starting point for fixing it—without flipping your entire workplace upside down.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome back to Simply SharePoint, the podcast where we make SharePoint actually work for real people in real workplaces. I'm Liza, and if you're new here, welcome to the show where we skip the theory and get straight into the solutions that actually work. Today, I'm excited to talk about something I've been working on that I think is going to help a lot of you. It's called the 5-Day SharePoint Reset. But before I dive into what it is, let me tell you why I created it. A while ago, I was working in an organization where the marketing team had a SharePoint library that was honestly a disaster. We're talking folders that were nested like six levels deep, documents with names like final underscore final version three, actually underscore final doc. No, I'm serious. And a permission structure that looked like it was designed by someone throwing darts at a board. The team lead looked at me and said, Liza, we know we need to fix this, but we don't have time for a massive overhaul. We just need something simple that works. And that's when it hit me. Most SharePoint advice assumes you can start from scratch or dedicate weeks to reorganization, but that's not reality for most of us. So today I'm going to walk you through the five-day SharePoint reset, a practical approach that gets you real results without turning your work life upside down. And at the end, I'll tell you how you can get the complete guide and start your own reset this week. The problem with SharePoint advice. Let's be honest about something. Most SharePoint guidance is written by people who've never had to deal with inherited chaos. You know what I'm talking about? You open up a SharePoint site that someone else set up and it looks like a digital tornado hit it. The typical advice goes something like this. First, establish your information architecture. Then, create a comprehensive governance framework. Next, implement a metadata taxonomy. Yeah, that's all true. But I'm sitting here thinking, that's great. But what about the 10,000 documents that are already there? What about the fact that I have actual work to do today? Here's the thing. Most SharePoint environments become messy for completely understandable reasons. Maybe you inherited a system from someone who left the company. Maybe your SharePoint grew organically as your team grew and nobody had time to sort of sit back and organize it properly. Maybe you had a consultant set something up that looked great in the demo, but it didn't match how your team actually works. I've worked on hundreds and hundreds of SharePoint sites, and I can tell you that SharePoint chaos is practically universal. It's not because people are lazy or don't care. It's because SharePoint is powerful, which means there are a million ways to organize things. And when you're busy, you just dump files wherever seems reasonable at the moment. The problem with the rip and replace mentality is that it doesn't work for real workplaces. You can't shut down your document management system for three weeks while you rebuild everything from scratch. You need solutions that work around your existing constraints, your deadlines, your team's varying technical skills and your budget limitations. That's why I'm such a big believer in what I call strategic improvements. Small, targeted changes that deliver immediate value and build momentum for bigger changes later. Because here's what I've learned. People need to see that SharePoint can actually work before they'll invest time in making it work better. When that marketing team I mentioned earlier saw how much easier it was to find their campaign assets after just one day of targeted improvements, suddenly everyone was interested in doing more. But if I had started by asking them to reorganize their entire site structure and They would have given up before we even started. Breaking down the five-day reset. So let me walk you through what the five-day SharePoint reset actually looks like. Each day focuses on one small achievable task that builds toward a cleaner, more functional SharePoint environment. Day one is all about honest assessment. I call it Scan and Spot the Chaos. You're going to pick one document library, just one, and spend exactly five minutes scanning through it like a detective. You're not trying to fix anything yet. You're just documenting what's not working. Look for things like excessive folder nesting that makes you click five times to find a document, inconsistent naming conventions, random document types all mixed together, And those files with last modified dates from, say, 2018. But nobody wants to touch, but nobody wants to delete either. Why doesn't anyone want to delete anything anyway? Well, that's another podcast episode in itself. Anyway, the key here is to write down what you find. This isn't busy work. It creates accountability and gives you a baseline to measure your progress against. By the end of day one, you should have a clear picture of at least two to three major issues that when fixed will make the biggest difference for your team. Day two is about creating one useful view. This is where we move from observation to action. You're going to create a single, well-designed, custom view that addresses one of your biggest findability issues. The right view can completely transform how people interact with your library. without requiring any reorganization of the actual files. Maybe your team struggles to find the latest version of documents, so you create a recent activity view, sorted by modified date. Maybe document ownership is unclear, so you create an owner accountability view, grouped by who created each file. The goal isn't to solve every problem. It's to solve one problem really well. I love this step because it's where people start to see the potential. When you share that new view with your colleagues and they say, oh, wow, this actually makes sense. That's when you know you're on the right track. Views seriously can transform your library and how your colleagues feel about it. Unfortunately, most end users aren't trained in creating views at all. I wrote an entire blog post on that one recently. Now on to day three. Day three is what I call fix folder hell just a bit. Folder structures in SharePoint often evolve chaotically over time. And day three is about making targeted improvements without disrupting your entire system. You're looking for three types of problematic folders. The shouting folders, you know, with all caps, names that create sort of visual noise. The deeply nested structures that require four or more clicks to reach actual documents. And the name nightmares. You know, those folders with confusing similar names like project files or project documents and project info. The key word here is targeted. You're not reorganizing everything. You're fixing the most disruptive issues. Rename unclear folders. with more descriptive names, flatten folder structures wherever possible, and consolidate duplicate folders to reduce choice paralysis. Now, day four is tag just one thing. Metadata is SharePoint's secret weapon, but implementing it can feel overwhelming. So instead of trying to tag everything, we apply metadata to just one document type or category. Maybe you choose policy documents and add fields for status and department. Maybe you pick project deliverables and add fields for project phase and project owner. The goal is to demonstrate the value of metadata in a focused way that people can actually see and use. After you tag those documents, create a filtered view that showcases your newly organized content. When people see how much easier it is to find what they need, they start asking, can we do this for other types of documents too? And that's exactly the momentum you want to build. Day five is about preventing future chaos by setting up what I call a staging library or needs review area. This addresses one of the biggest challenges in document management. People need a quick place to save files and without stopping to think about proper classification. What you do is create a designated space where users can drop files that will later be properly processed and moved to permanent locations. This keeps your main libraries organized while still giving people a place to save things quickly when they're under deadline pressure. The beauty of this approach is that it acknowledges reality. People are going to save files quickly sometimes, and that's okay. But instead of letting those quick saves mess up your organized libraries, you give them a designated place to land temporarily. Let me share a couple of success stories to show you how this actually works in practice. That marketing team that I mentioned earlier? After their five-day reset, they went from spending 15 to 20 minutes looking for campaign assets to finding what they needed in under two minutes. But more importantly, they started maintaining the organisation because they could see how much time it saved them. The IT department and other office had been struggling for months to get users to follow naming conventions. After implementing the staging library approach, Compliance went from about 30% to over 80% in just a few weeks. Why? Because people had a place to put files quickly and the IT team had a systematic way to process and properly organize them. Here's what I love about these stories. The improvements weren't just technical. The marketing team started collaborating better because they could actually find each other's work. The IT department went from being the SharePoint police to to being helpful partners in keeping things organized. And in both cases, the success of the five-day reset built momentum for bigger improvements. Once people saw that SharePoint could actually work for them instead of against them, they were willing to invest time in learning more advanced features and following better practices. The key insight here is that you don't need perfect organization to see dramatic improvements. You just need strategic organization, fixing the right things in the right order to create the biggest impact with the least disruption. So this now brings me to something I'm really excited to share with you. The five-day SharePoint Reset is actually the first product in a new series I'm launching called Fix the Mess. I've been working on this for a while now because I kept seeing the same pattern. People need practical, achievable solutions for SharePoint chaos, not more theoretical frameworks. The Fix the Mess series is designed specifically for people dealing with inherited or chaotic SharePoint environments. The five-day reset is your starter kit. It's designed to give you those quick wins and build momentum while you're waiting for the full course to launch. Speaking of which, the complete Fix the Mess course SharePoint Cleanup for Real Workspaces, launches in just a few weeks. The full course goes deep into everything we can't cover in five days. Comprehensive site restructuring, advanced metadata strategies, permission optimization, workflow automation, and building sustainable governance that people can actually follow. Also following on from that course will be the Fix the Mess mini assessment course for co-pilot readiness. And whilst I'm mentioning Copilot, all the things we are doing in the five-day reset and the full Fix the Mess course prepare you for Copilot, so keep that in mind. But here's the thing. You don't have to wait for the full course to get started. The five-day reset gives you immediate value and helps you figure out if this approach works for your specific situation. The starter kit includes two things, a guide that walks you through each day with explanations, and a set of slides that you can use as a checklist, share with your team, or even present to stakeholders to show them your improvement plan. Here's what I want you to take away from today's episode. SharePoint chaos is fixable, but you don't need to fix everything at once to see dramatic improvements. The five-day SharePoint reset proves that small, strategic changes can transform how your team works with documents and information. And the best part? You can start tomorrow. If you're ready to begin your own five-day reset, head over to resources.simplysharepoint.com to grab the complete starter kit. And honestly, if it saves you even one hour of searching for documents, it's paid for itself. And if you want to be first in line for the full Fix the Mess course when it launches, make sure you're on the waitlist at resources.simplysharepoint.com slash courses slash fixthemess. People on the waitlist get early access and special pricing. Next week, I'm going to dive into one of the most requested topics, how to handle SharePoint permissions without losing your mind. Trust me, you don't want to miss that one. Until then, remember... Thanks for listening to Simply SharePoint. If this episode helped you, share it with someone who's struggling with their own SharePoint chaos. I'll be back next week with more SharePoint solutions that actually work in the real world. This has been Simply SharePoint. I'm Liza, and I'll talk to you next week.

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