Goal: 

Audit the Technical Support Confluence space – and find opportunities for improvement – before migrating to a new instance of Confluence. 

My role:

I conducted the audit and coordinated the cleanup afterwards.

Deliverables:

• Representative audit of 1000+ pages displaying page views, page age, content type, audience, broken links.

• Recommendations to keep, update, or archive each page.

• Proposed improvements to the navigation, content freshness, and governance based on the audit.

Results:

After the audit and cleanup, the space size went from over 2,000 pages to just over 1,500, ensuring that a much leaner, more up-to-date space would be migrated.

• The navigation was simplified and renamed based on survey input from more than 50 respondents.

• Pages were labeled using a new, consistent system.

Before:

I identified a few key problems from just a cursory review of the Confluence space:

• The content was out of date; many pages hadn’t been modified in years. There were even comments on pages noting the content should be disregarded, and some pages had large sections of text struck out.

• Different teams seemed to “own” different sections, with little coordination between them. Pages were organized by the team structure, not based on relevance of the content within them.

• Maintenance (if any) varied widely between teams.

• Some content was clearly duplicated between sections.

• The disorganized nature of the pages might be familiar to a tenured technician, but new technicians struggled to find things.

• Given the above facts, technicians didn’t always trust the content, and often asked a lead to vet the information was still valid. This was hardly a scalable practice!

After:

My final inventory included 1,217 pages. 65% of those pages were approved for archiving. The remainder were added to a content backlog for closer review and link updates.

• At the start of the audit, about 40% of the pages hadn’t been modified in the previous 5 years. By the end of the archiving stage, this was down to 17%.

• I reorganized the space by grouping pages topically, reducing the number of items in the page tree from 31 to 7 and making navigation much easier.

• I wrote and implemented labeling guidelines to make pages easier to find and review in the future.

• I proposed a new maintenance and permissions model for the team to review. Unfortunately, this phase of the work stalled as an uptick in cases took priority. However, I was still able to redesign the home page to feature the most popular pages and a search bar to make it easier to browse the remaining content.

Process:

In initial interviews with stakeholders, the Confluence space was repeatedly identified as a pain point, with one key stakeholder even describing it as “an experience to behold.” Given the upcoming migration, I decided it would be the first content source to target in the overall strategy. 

An audit was a natural place to start. I developed a detailed spreadsheet to capture the page title, last modified date, type of content, audience, and if there were any broken links. I used this information, plus page view traffic from Google Analytics to make a recommendation: keep the page, update it, or archive it. Eventually, I also added a suggested new location based on the new navigation I built out. 

While I was able to conduct the audit independently, I needed team managers from each region and, in some cases, subject matter experts, to vet my recommendations for each page. I coordinated short reviews with all of them via a shared spreadsheet. 

The Confluence space is frequently accessed by the team as they resolve cases (Google Analytics indicated there were close to 100,000 page views a year). So it was important to clearly communicate to the team what the audit entailed, who was involved, and how we planned to keep disruption to a minimum. I posted announcements in Slack, wrote a detailed document anyone could follow along for updates, and kept a survey open for feedback throughout the process. Feedback was largely positive, like:

What I’d do differently:

• In my user interviews, I spent more time talking to team members in the USCA region than the others. I gathered feedback from the other regions too, but if I were repeating this project, I’d aim for a more representative group of interviewees.

• Unfortunately, there was a significant disconnect between leadership’s appetite for documentation cleanup and what certain managers felt was needed. In future phases, I looked more carefully at leaders’ priorities to guide the projects I proposed and worked on, to better secure resources to complete the work.