Create a removal plan

Identify roles and responsibility

This step is more for major updates. You won’t need to do this step for minor updates.

In your plan, mark who is responsible for approving each of the removed pages and document their agreement.</p>
<p>Agree who is responsible for each step. This includes:

• technical requirements
• communication (both internal and external),
• archival,
• content management and
• risk management.

Core people you’ll need to talk to are:

• Content owner: reviews content for removal
• Information and records manager:
• Owner of the archiving policy, as they'll be able to tell you how long content needs to stay
• IT: implements technical aspects, such as redirects
• Comms: they will communicate any decommission messaging

Document content retention

You’ll need to keep content for different lengths of time. Your records and management area should be able to tell you your retention period. Once recorded you can take action accordingly.

Schedule

Large scale removals need coordination from everyone involved. Getting sign off from all branches on timeframes is the key to success.

Set up standards

As you start this removal plan, it’s good practise to think about longer term strategy.

You can negotiate standard removal periods for common types of content, such as media releases or industry notices. For example, you might retain content for current year and previous 2 years. this will help to avoid a large backlog of content.

Publish your time frames to remove content amongst your team. This will help you to initiate regular content reviews and to negotiate removal periods.