Most legacy document cleanup projects don’t die because they’re hard. They die because they’re never urgent.
A wealth management firm with years of accumulated files on SharePoint knows exactly what needs to happen: clarify retention policy, tag for compliance, decide what to keep and what to discard. Nobody disputes the plan. But client onboarding has a deadline. A compliance filing has a deadline. Cleaning up old files has no deadline, so it loses every time a real one shows up, indefinitely.
That’s a different problem than not having enough hands. It’s that the project never has a reason to happen this week instead of next week, so it never happens at all.
The fix isn’t finding more capacity. It’s removing the reason the project stalls in the first place: automate the inventory itself, so there’s no multi week block of focused time to schedule around. A metadata pass across the repository, creation dates, naming patterns, size distributions, surfaces what actually exists and what the retention policy requires, without anyone opening a folder. The three month project that never had a slot on the calendar becomes a same day answer, and the decision about what to keep gets made without ever competing with client work for attention.