Terminology Tuesday: Asset Management

There’s a section of my next book that I’m working on, and one sub-section discusses asset management (my editor will be pleased to hear that I am in fact at least thinking about writing). While at Learning Solutions Conference 2015, I attended a morning buzz session on Content Curation, wherein asset management was discussed…A LOT. It seemed as though many folks either didn’t know what the heck ‘asset management’ meant, or how to go about managing their assets, so I saw an opportunity for a great Terminology Tuesday topic. What can I say, I’m an opportunist…when it comes to blogging at least.

Asset Management

Asset management is just what it sounds like – managing your assets. Now, your ‘assets’ may come in many forms. For example, Media Assets (images/video/audio), Customer Furnished Assets (files provided by the client, which could be images/video/audio/PowerPoints/Word documents, etc.), Content Output (outputs from whichever authoring tool you’re using). If you’ve worked on large projects, you will likely relate to how unwieldy these assets can become if you don’t have a system in place for keeping everything organized.

This is where the ‘management’ element comes into play. What I like to do to manage my assets is to set up a folder structure. I’ve adopted a folder structure based on that of an organization I worked for previously…because it made sense and was easy to follow. It looks something like this:

Project Folder

• 100 Project Management
  • Depending on how large the project is, this folder may have sub-folders; for example:
    • Meeting Minutes
    • Action Tracking
    • Risk Management
    • Contracts
    • Invoices
• 200 Development
  • This folder typically contains sub-folders related to my development; for example:
    • Client-Furnished Information (CFI)
    • Scripts and Storyboards
      • Audio Narration
    • Media
      • Video
      • Audio
        • Scratch Audio
        • Final Audio
      • Images
      • Flash
    • Output
    • Quality Assurance
• 300 Client
  • This folder will include anything sent to the client for review; for example:
    • Delivered
    • Review Comments
    • Final

Within these folders, there may be other sub-folders, but this is the general structure I follow. When it comes to filenames, I either follow a file naming convention dictated by the client, or will follow an internal file naming convention I’m accustomed to, which indicates the project, type of media, asset number, and version number. For example, PROJECT_A_001_01 (which indicates Audio file 1, version 1). If there are multiple or courses for one project, I will also add an arbitrary course number so that I can keep everything in check, and I will maintain these filenames within a spreadsheet, housed within the main 200>Media folder.

Now…I get that all of this may sound super detailed and overwhelming, but when you get used to operating in a somewhat-organized manner, it really helps streamline your workflow and make you more efficient. It also makes it a lot easier to call up course assets in the event you need to re-use them (e.g. if you’re working for a client with multiple projects that may have shared elements).

Basically, you just need to commit to a structure, and then keep using that structure and process whenever you begin work on a new project. It can be a pain in the butt to set up sometimes, especially if you’re really busy and especially if you cringe at the thought of doing ‘unpaid’ administrative duties for your business, but believe me…you will thank me later. When you aren’t spending even more ‘unpaid’ hours digging through external hard drives or flash drives looking for some obscure storyboard you worked on two years ago. Can I get an amen?!