Interesting perspective if your client is in an industry (for example public sector) with a legislated file plan, because delicate education will clash with forceful personalities, but at least you have the National Archives Act on your side. In the private sector, there is a mountain of legislation buried within other Acts which dictate things like retention frameworks etc. that can act as a hard stop in the RIM, so at least you have that. The challenge lies is in people's personal taxonomies based on their core processes, when these clash with other organisational processes. An example I have come up against is when the Sales and Marketing processes to manage buyer engagement meet Operational processes to manage the actual project. The most senior/influential person usually wins in setting up the IA, especially when companies have grown organically and document/records management don't align with real-life processes anymore. Once again, I have found that high-touch education and engagement with the clients at all levels is important so that they start at a point of consensus for adoption, as one of the ways to discourage people from "bending" the rules.

Reading back, I see that I haven't responded to the question you asked which is about identifying the patterns that other people don’t see. You make such a good point about knowing how to surface the "allowances".

I recently had to do a DMS for a client who had recently undergone a plethora of changes with lots of new people having joined. On top of that, they were migrating from on-prem to M365. "Just in case" was a real possibility. We started off by migrating everything and providing detailed records proving that everything had been moved across; gaining their trust in the process. Then we put a stake in the ground of pre and post Covid for everything except the Incorporation artifacts and other governance documents and carefully worked through the rest of them with the management to restructure and lable the DMS according to their processes. Everything pre Covid and duplicates were archived "just in case" they needed them. That was 3 years ago and now that they have realised they didn't need to older material they are ready to implement records management and retention policies. It took a long time but gaining their trust was the secret.

Ownership is also ambiguous when RIM belongs in different departments; if it sits under Risk in Finance, within the EXCO team or in the DMS in IT, different imperatives may be placed on the ownership, resource requirements in HR and other processes which leads to lack of accountability.

One reason to review your retention schedule is in times of transition. If the organisation is undergoing a change in strategic direction, evolution of the management team or simply responding to new technology trends or legislation then RIM and Governance should feature in the big picture process.

Action 2: When the RIM is defined together with the responsible person, unpack it in line with what adds value in their performance indicators. I once headed up Marketing in a very large IT corporate, where my job was to build a robust brand, through being extremely responsive to market conditions. It was decided in the bowels of the organisation that we needed to become ISO compliant. Not only did no one explain the purpose of ISO to me in my fast paced environment, but an old army-trained technocrat would sit in my office, weekly, expecting me to document the wrong processes in my job (gleened no doubt from a 40 year old academic textbook - pre the IT industry and B2B marketing) and the filing mechanism for selling consumables to retail customers. I fought back. It a waste of time, would have hardcoded my creativity and reduced my value in the business development process.