Governance and workflow

Content governance is about the long-term management of content. It gives clear direction on:

• how content is organised and managed
• who is involved at what stage and in what capacity
• what standards and guidelines the content should adhere to.

Content governance models

A content governance model creates a standard for your organisation so you can publish high-quality, consistent, effective content.

A basic content governance model should include:

• structure – how content teams are structured in the organisation
• roles and responsibilities – the roles relating to content and the responsibilities that come with them
• process and workflow – a detailed process and timeline covering every stage of your content lifecycle, from creation to maintenance to archiving
• standards and policies – a comprehensive set of rules and guidelines your content should adhere to.

Structure

Structure refers to how your content team(s) is structured and connected across all the different departments, products or markets. To work out what structure your organisation uses, you can:

• review existing documentation about the content lifecycle and processes
• conduct interviews, meetings or workshops with internal stakeholders, such as content managers, content owners, content developers and content publishers.

Three common content governance structures are:

• centralised – a central team ‘owns’ and controls content for the whole organisation. There might be some support or localisation from different departments, streams or markets
• decentralised – different departments, streams or markets take responsibility for their own content, with little direction from the centre
• distributed (or hybrid) – a central content team provides leadership, support and some content. Departments, streams and markets have autonomy, but everyone shares content and best practice.

Roles and responsibilities

This is the ‘who does what’ of the governance structure. If this is not already established, think about defining:

• leadership – who is the content lead? Do you have a head of content, content strategist, chief content officer or a managing editor? What are they responsible for?
• senior support – who will sponsor content or give you a mandate at the highest level of your organisation?
• content development – who are the writers, editors or graphic designers?
• publishing – who is responsible for publishing finalised, approved content? This could be a communications team, web team or social media team.

A process and workflow map is a detailed description of what happens to your content and when. It needs to cover every stage of your content lifecycle. You need to consider:

• each step of content development, including the discovery phase (such as user research), and the evaluation and maintenance phases after content is published
• who is involved at each step and how much time they need to deliver on their responsibilities
• how results or content are passed from one step to the next, and how this is communicated.

This can be included in your content strategy as a flowchart or process diagram.

Standards and policies

Most organisations will need to adhere to a set of standards when publishing content. These may be internal standards or external standards, for example: 

• external
• accessibility guidelines
• legal or compliance guidelines
• privacy policies
• internal
• writing guidelines
• editorial guidelines
• brand guidelines
• channel guidelines
• message hierarchy
• content principles
• design content models
• content templates.

Current state vs future state

Developing or updating a content strategy is the perfect time to optimise your content governance model, particularly if your research on business needs identifies that content workflow needs to be improved.

When reviewing your current governance model (current state), think about the following:

• Are there any pain points with content development?
• Are there any bottlenecks when developing content?
• Is the step-by-step process clear? 
• Are roles and responsibilities clear?
• Who are the content owners?
• Are there enough resources to develop good content, or are shortcuts happening?

These answers are likely to be identified during internal stakeholder interviews or surveys.

You can then develop a future state model that addresses these issues. It may be helpful to:

• develop new workflow diagrams that include clearly defined roles and responsibilities 
• visualise the new content lifecycle in a diagram
• include a workflow and approvals process for urgent requests, so that immediate reactions do not result in suboptimal content being published
• include a process for assigning review and archive dates for every piece of content
• identify who will be responsible for maintaining the content strategy after it is implemented.

The governance model for the future state should clearly outline how content governance is improved and the efficiencies it introduces, such as faster turnaround times for publication or freeing up resources (financial or people).