Best answer by Ali Berman
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Has anyone run through a content audit?
Userlevel 3
Hi friends! Has anyone successfully ran their SMEs through a formal content *audit process*? We have taken everyone through one audit cycle, but I was hoping to revamp our process and see if anyone had some best practices to share!
Userlevel 4
+4
I'd love to see what your process looks like if you wouldn't mind sharing too!
Userlevel 3
I tried to model it off of a deep dives from last year I think by Square! We held a meeting with SMEs prior to launching explaining why we needed an audit & what they could expect. I developed a canva image guideline for them to review & a workbook with some pre-sync questions to help guide discussion on our syncs. I broke it up into 25% of SMEs per quarter, but likely will base it by boards or # of content each quarter this time around.
I was probably too ambitious in thinking we would get through so much in only a few syncs with each SME and definitely feel like I needed to provide more support/guidance to our SMEs to make these changes.
I found these areas of focus to be most valuable
• Having them link their favorite card they verify & why. Then spending time highlighting their most popular cards / connecting positive feedback to work they did.
• Having them identify the purpose of their content / does their content only pertain to certain roles within a department.
• What they felt were the 10 most important topics (include resource links)
• What they received the most questions on in slack
• Did they feel their content was duplicated or contradicted elsewhere
• Pain Points and/or issues/problems with guru
Other questions in workbook I spent the least amount of time on.
• Assessment of Shared content across your team (especially since we have departments not on guru)
• Assessment of Global content (and if SME for different languages had been identified)
• What they needed the most help with formatting wise (titles, tags, body of content, organization of boards/sections, etc)
• Reviewing Comments / Archiving cards
• New Content they plan to migrate into guru
• Provide thoughts on SPNRs I gathered I felt were relevant to that SME's content
• Worked on a "tag skeleton" together, but we are scratching that and taking more ownership of tags
I was probably too ambitious in thinking we would get through so much in only a few syncs with each SME and definitely feel like I needed to provide more support/guidance to our SMEs to make these changes.
I found these areas of focus to be most valuable
• Having them link their favorite card they verify & why. Then spending time highlighting their most popular cards / connecting positive feedback to work they did.
• Having them identify the purpose of their content / does their content only pertain to certain roles within a department.
• What they felt were the 10 most important topics (include resource links)
• What they received the most questions on in slack
• Did they feel their content was duplicated or contradicted elsewhere
• Pain Points and/or issues/problems with guru
Other questions in workbook I spent the least amount of time on.
• Assessment of Shared content across your team (especially since we have departments not on guru)
• Assessment of Global content (and if SME for different languages had been identified)
• What they needed the most help with formatting wise (titles, tags, body of content, organization of boards/sections, etc)
• Reviewing Comments / Archiving cards
• New Content they plan to migrate into guru
• Provide thoughts on SPNRs I gathered I felt were relevant to that SME's content
• Worked on a "tag skeleton" together, but we are scratching that and taking more ownership of tags
Userlevel 3
+3
Just shared some great audit resources with us - maybe she can share them here too! :wink: I find audits VERY time-consuming, and somewhat difficult to move along since for most of our SMEs, their ticket work is the higher priority. With that said, I have some basic guidelines for teams looking to do an audit of their content which allows me to be more of a resource and PM to guide them in making informed decisions.
Some functional things we do:
- Export card content and add to a Gsheet template that includes some extra columns for Action needed, Status, Due date, and Notes, in addition to the columns that are baked in to the Guru card export.
- Usually I'm the one doing the export so I tidy up & hide some of the columns we don't really care to look at like "card creator" or "Collection" etc.
- Give firm check in points/due dates - I've found if I don't do this, the audit drags on for months.
Best practices:
- Use data to inform decisions; look at the Card views, copies, and favorites to get a sense of if ppl are using the card (both in the export for an overview and in the card details itself for more granular data.)
- I ask them to go through the cards and note proposed actions: *Keep* (no edits needed), *Edit*, *Merge*, *Archive*. ◦ For *Merge* specifically, we usually try to consolidate very short cards because we've found that being too granular hurts searchability for us.
- We always merge the lesser used card into the card with more views/copies/favorites.
- For *Archive* considerations, we keep in mind that the card may be linked from elsewhere (both in Guru and in our other resources) and how archiving may affect/cause broken links.
- All of this work is done BEFORE they ping me to review their proposed changes in the spreadsheet so I can leave my own feedback and give next steps.
I find the spreadsheet makes it easier to have multiple SME collaborators doing their work simultaneously, and helps ME keep track of the audit as a whole. Happy to chat more about our auditing trial & error processes over the last few years and how they've evolved as we've scaled! (And yes, I have a Guru card in our Collection with all of the audit processes written out! 😅)
Userlevel 3
- Guru Senior Product Specialist
- 47 replies
-
22 March 2021
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