Topic: Project folder structure

[Jeff H]

Anyone care to share their folder structure for projects?
Any tips or guidelines learned throughout years that make handling, sharing xrefs, support files etc.... easier?

[huiz]

I think it is difficult to find one "best" method, it depends on a lot of things. If you have projects with a geographic location needs to be handled different than machinery designs or tube sensors development.

Any structured system is good, as long as anybody will follow the company rules.

In my last job we had a map structure of letters A, B, C etc, and in that we had maps with city names, in that we had maps with street names, and in that we had maps with the project name. And in that we had drawing files with the project name and a sequential number. For xrefs, documents, incoming data and outgoing data we had seperate maps in the project map.

It works quite well, the drafters were trying to follow these rules, only the management had trouble keeping things nice and clean. I've suggested once that management people should not have access to the business network. As result the suggestion box was removed by the management.

[KewlToyZ]

Parent folders are letters representing the client name. (A,B,C,D,E,etc...)

Project Specific Child folder is the Letter followed by the project number which would be the 4 digit project number generated when it was entered into accounting. This was based upon the fact a project cannot exist unless it has a billing identifier which pretty much keeps people from doing free work. The first two numeric digits represent the year the project started. This also makes it easier to track down a projects life cycle. Example: (A12001, C12062, R12003)

Below this begins the folder tree for all electronic production.

BOM - Bill of Materials for the project
Correspondence - Emails, contracts, etc...
Drawings - All AutoCAD, Revit, Etc...
Submissions - All electronic PDF, DWF, Tiff, etc... sent to client for each phase as hard copy.

Below the Drawings folder:
ARCH
CIVIL
ELEC
MECH
PLUM
STRUC
XREF

We kept the XREF folder as the central location where backgrounds were converted to publish lighter and were color converted from those received by Architects, Civil, & Structural to be used for the MEP files.

As updates are received, they are placed into a child folder representing the date they were received.
Just in case there is a reversion and design changes occur. The files in the root folder are always updated to the most current. It also helps when trying to track correspondence, billing, and project life cycles.