How do you collate together your materials?

Or put another way, how do you politely request ("ensure") your clients provide you with the materials you need and in a format you understand throughout the spec phase?

Sorry - I couldn't fit that into the subject!

I reckon eight out of ten courses I work on begin with a right mish-mash of content;

- messy PowerPoints

- PDFs and Office documents that bear no resemblance to their title or file name (a real bug bear of mine!)

- narration that is often devoid of focus

- video clips nabbed off a library DVD that make little sense

- library images that wouldn't look out of character in a late-90's PowerPoint seminar

- content that generally doesn't make sense (except to the SME(s)) and is only sometimes uniform in context or truly specific to the learning objective(s) 

This isn't a rant - it's more a case of wanting to draw a line under the time it takes to spec a course, and instead find ways to work on something more concise.

Hence the time has come to put together a document that politely requests some sort of order instead of chaos.  Could be a while before this gets done though.

In the meantime, do any of you just go freestyle or do you stipulate something more structured?