Flying Solo: Survival Strategies for the One-Person Records Management Department
If you’re the only records manager in your organization, you already know the feeling: overwhelming responsibility, endless priorities, and the nagging question of where to even begin.
The good news? You’re not alone in being alone.
Seasoned records management professionals who’ve walked this path have invaluable guidance that can transform your solo journey from survival mode to strategic success. Read on for their advice.
The foundation of a successful records management program isn’t defined by the latest software or the most sophisticated retention schedule. It’s built on relationships.
When you’re working solo, your success depends entirely on how well you connect with colleagues across your organization. Access’ Samantha Poindexter recommends to “put yourself out there. Schedule one-on-one coffee meetings. Show up at lunchtime yoga or those corporate happy hours you’ve been skipping. Be present and visible. This isn’t networking for networking’s sake, it’s about building the social capital you’ll need when you’re asking departments to change how they’ve always done things.”
And your relationship-building efforts shouldn’t be limited to executives; there’s value in connecting with colleagues across the board. For example, Hannah Arnow explains how talking with manufacturing facility employees at Textron helps reveal opportunities for records management process improvements.
Just because you’re the only official records manager doesn’t mean you have to work entirely alone.
The most effective records programs sit at the intersection of three critical functions: legal, IT, and the business. Without understanding business needs, IT can’t provide the right tools. And, without the right tools, employees will find workarounds that undermine your entire program.
Your goal is to find the department members who know what records exist, who creates them, and why they matter, then unofficially recruit them to your cause. Your coordinators provide the detailed knowledge you need; you provide the strategic framework and governance structure.
When deciding where to invest your limited time and energy first, Mike Francis of Diamondback Energy recommends starting with your legal department.
Why legal before IT or business units? Because legal has immediate, tangible skin in the game. They need to respond to discovery orders. They worry about litigation holds. They understand compliance consequences. This shared concern about risk often makes them your natural first ally and most powerful advocate.
Working solo doesn’t mean working in isolation. A wealth of resources exists beyond your organization’s walls: state archivists, grants for specific projects, online communities, and more.
Professional associations like ARMA International and AIIM offer educational opportunities and access to communities of practitioners facing similar challenges. They’re gold mines of support and knowledge.
Don’t overlook vendor relationships either. They’ve seen dozens or hundreds of implementations and can offer perspective on what works and what doesn’t. Request demos, ask questions, and learn from their experience with other clients.
These relationships provide access to best practices, war stories, and solutions you’d never develop in a vacuum.
Perhaps the most liberating advice for solo records managers is this: you don’t have to solve everything at once.
Access’ Randy Sanders recommends to “start small, start really small, get a few of those successes where you can build that credibility. Get a couple of those quick wins in, normalize it, and you’ll see it snowball after that.”
Similarly, Rae Lynn Haliday of the St. Louis Zoo suggests beginning with the records that are most critical to the business, especially in areas tied to revenue or risk. But no matter where you start, the key is to just start.
And don’t forget to celebrate the small wins. They build momentum, demonstrate value, and make the next project easier to approve and accomplish.
One of the smartest things a department of one can do is simplify the work wherever possible, starting with the retention schedule itself. Overly detailed frameworks may look comprehensive on paper, but they are harder to maintain, harder for others to follow, and much more likely to break down when one person is carrying the load. “The fastest win is to be able to consolidate that information down, larger categories, bigger buckets that you can throw more things into that are alike,” says Robert Johnson, an Information Governance Field Expert.
Remember, a simple schedule people actually use beats a sophisticated one gathering dust.
The same principle applies to day-to-day execution. Standardization and automation are not just nice to have when you are working alone, they’re how you create capacity. The more you can rely on templates, predefined fields, auto-classification, and metadata capture, the less time you spend answering the same questions, correcting inconsistencies, or cleaning up avoidable mistakes later.
Just as importantly, do not build processes that require everyone else to change how they work overnight. Meet people where they already work. The goal is to embed records management into existing workflows, not create a parallel universe your colleagues have to remember to visit.
Being a solo records manager is undeniably challenging, but it’s also an opportunity. You have the agility to build relationships across silos, the flexibility to start with quick wins, and the potential to become the connective tissue that holds your organization’s information governance together.
Start with legal. Build your coordinator network. Leverage external resources. Get one quick win and use that momentum to expand. And remember that small, strategic victories matter more than comprehensive plans that never launch.
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