Thanks for your comment. Have you come across the Digital Governance Journal and Lisa Welchman’s work on web governance? Might be a good place to start.

I have been writing a guide to Governance for Digital Communications on my website, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it, if you have a chance to read: http://www.dscottdiperna.com/category/web/governance/

I wrote a governance document for Barnard College when I was the Director of Electronic Communications there, and at the time I wrote it, there was little helpful information about how to do it — just a lot people saying it was important. I’m hoping to be able to contribute something back to others to help ease the process for them. It’s the kind of thing that is really easy to put off in the day-to-day grind of work.

My aim is to make something that is very functional and direct, so I wrote it as a series of questions for people to answer. The difficulty, I find, is that writing this kind of plan requires a lot of sustained critical thinking, and the person writing it probably won’t have all the answers to the questions. This makes it very easy to get stuck and then put it off. I’m not sure I have a solution to the getting stuck on questions you can’t answer, other than to skip them until you can answer them. It’s not an easy task.

I would love to hear your thoughts!

Cheers, Scott

“Many web projects are sold in a murky bait-and-switch fashion, where the agency agrees to an unrealistic fixed spec written by the client, and then hopes that once the problems become obvious, the client will prefer to pay their way out of the mess rather than starting over with a new agency.”

There are good clients out there, ones that are willing to work collaboratively with a partner, ones that recognize that agencies are businesses that need to be managed profitably. There needs to be a mutual exchange of value between the client and the agency, otherwise they don’t get good work.

If a client requires a fixed scope before you even know what you’re building, let that be a warning to you.

Great to hear the update!

As you say, “explaining that the client shares accountability and ultimately is responsible for making it work” is a big deal, and difficult to do in practice because clients don’t tend to approach projects with that attitude.

This statement continues to be true however: “Just because a client says they want content strategy, it doesn’t mean that they understand what that actually entails, or that they’re ready to start changing the organization.” I think even after a content strategy is done, presented and approved, clients don’t understand what the implications of that really are. We [I] need to be better about doing more education upfront and explaining that the client shares accountability and ultimately is responsible for making it work.