When content governance is worth the effort

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. Content governance is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

Content is the part of a project most likely to be underestimated and most likely to delay a launch. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

When it is worth it

Someone must own each page or it rots. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions.

How to decide

Removing outdated content is maintenance, not loss. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

What this looks like day to day

Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. 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• Removing outdated content is maintenance, not loss — and you know whether that is true here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

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.