How to get content governance right
We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. The short answer to content governance is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
Why it matters
Someone must own each page or it rots. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- Set review dates when content is published
- Removing outdated content is maintenance, not loss
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
Removing outdated content is maintenance, not loss. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.
A reasonable first step
What this looks like day to day
Content is the part of a project most likely to be underestimated and most likely to delay a launch. Three things worth confirming about content governance before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Removing outdated content is maintenance, not loss — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.