Content governance

What content governance is

Content governance is the record of who is accountable for what you have already published. Every section of the site has a named owner, a named reviewer, an interval at which it is looked at, and a rule about who is allowed to change or delete it. It also says what happens to all of that when the named person leaves.

In a small business this is one page and a spreadsheet. The forty-page version belongs to organisations with a governance committee, and selling you that would be dishonest. What you need is a document where a person can point at a page and say whose it is.

It is most often confused with a content lifecycle plan, and the split is simple: governance names people, the lifecycle plan sets dates. Governance says the service pages belong to the operations manager. The lifecycle plan says they are reviewed every six months and refreshed when a price changes. The two documents are usually written together and they are still two documents.

It is also not the approval workflow. That governs drafts in flight. Governance governs pages already standing.

When you need one

Three situations. Three or more people can edit the site, and nobody is certain who last changed what. A member of staff has left and a body of pages nobody understands has been inherited along with their desk. Or there are pages everyone knows are wrong that stay wrong for months because no single person feels entitled to touch them.

If two people share a forty-page site, this is too much apparatus. Add an owner column to a plain inventory and you have solved the same problem in an afternoon.

What goes in it

• The ownership register. Every section of the site — not every page — with one named owner. The owner is accountable for the section being true, not necessarily the person who writes it.
• Reviewers and intervals. Who checks each section, how often, and what counts as having checked it. A review nobody recorded did not happen.
• Change and delete rights. Who may edit without asking, who must ask, and the very short list of pages that no one changes alone: pricing, legal, safety, anything a regulator reads.
• The handover rule. What happens to a section when its owner leaves or changes role, and the deadline for reassigning it. Unowned content is how sites decay.
• The escalation rule. What happens when a review is missed twice, and who is told. Without this, the register quietly becomes decoration.

What you get

The register. A spreadsheet, one row per section, with the owner, the reviewer, the interval, the last review date and the change rights. It is yours and it is meant to be edited, not admired.

The governance page. One page in plain language explaining the rules the register runs on, including the handover and escalation rules, so a new manager can read it in five minutes and be correct.

The handover note. A half-page template for the day somebody leaves, listing what must be reassigned and by when.

A one-hour session. On video with the named owners, going through the register line by line, because ownership assigned without the owner in the room is not ownership.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A Victoria property management company has about 120 pages across three parts of the business: residential leasing, commercial, and a maintenance division added three years ago. Six people can log into the site. Two have left in the past year. The commercial fee page still lists a service the company stopped offering, and three staff have separately said it should come down without anyone doing it.

The register takes the 120 pages down to eleven sections. Leasing belongs to the leasing manager, commercial to the director who runs it, maintenance to the operations lead, and the legal and fee pages are jointly the director's and the bookkeeper's, with a rule that neither changes them alone. Intervals are set at six months for anything with a price on it and twelve for everything else. The fee page comes down the same week, because for the first time somebody owns it. The register is one spreadsheet and the rules take a page.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Who can edit the site now, who has left, and which pages are stuck. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Agreed before anything starts, based on the size of the site and the number of people involved.
3. The sectioning. Your pages grouped into the smallest number of sections that can each carry one honest owner. Two to four working days, and quicker if you already have an inventory.
4. The naming conversation. Owners proposed, then agreed with you, then agreed with them. This is the step people skip and it is the step that makes it real.
5. The register, the rules and the session. Delivered together, with the hour to walk the owners through it. Two to three weeks from the first call.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call and agreed in writing before the work begins. It depends on how many pages there are, how many people hold editing rights, and whether an inventory already exists. It does not change without your agreement. The pricing page shows the four ways I work.

What happens next

A register with no dates against it drifts, so most people set the review and retirement schedule next, which is the natural companion document. Where drafts are also stalling, a sign-off path with named roles deals with the other half of the problem. And if the first round of reviews turns up more wrong pages than expected, a standing maintenance arrangement is how that gets worked through. None of it is assumed. The register is useful on the day it is agreed.