Auditing with a Team

Strategies for Shared Understanding and Effective Communication

Working on a content audit with a team has advantages and hurdles. A collaborative approach allows for increased productivity and a broader perspective on the audit results, fostering better acceptance and implementation. However, challenges can arise in maintaining a shared understanding of criteria, definitions, and the overall process, potentially leading to suboptimal outcomes. This blog post explores team-based content auditing, emphasizing the importance of shared language, thoughtful collaboration, and effective communication.

Opportunities and Challenges of Team Auditing

Opportunities

Working in a team offers the potential to divide and conquer, accomplishing more in less time. Collaboration ensures diverse perspectives and greater organizational buy-in, making audit results more influential and actionable.

Challenges

The flip side of collaboration lies in the challenge of ensuring every team member fully embraces the goals and process. Resistance or half-hearted participation can compromise the quality and reliability of the audit, necessitating additional efforts to rectify incomplete or inconsistent results.

Encouraging effective collaboration involves clear communication and an understanding of individual roles. Without a defined structure, tracking progress and ensuring comprehensive coverage become challenging.

Establishing a Shared Understanding

Thoughtful Criteria Selection

Team collaboration demands thoughtfulness in criteria selection and precision in definitions. Without a shared understanding of criteria, measurements, and evaluation processes, the audit's effectiveness diminishes. If each member of the auditing team can’t concisely and accurately define what each criterion means and how it will be measured, you risk having inconsistent results and rework later to reconcile the various interpretations. Getting everyone to that shared understanding from the start, ideally via a criteria working session where the team can talk through the definitions and how they’ll be evaluated is a good use of time early in the project. I’ve found that a good way to define the criteria is to come up with a series of questions that can be asked. For example, if a criterion is usability, ask whether there is a clear call to action on the page.

Shared Vocabulary

Part of the criteria selection and definition process is selecting and aligning on a shared vocabulary. This is particularly important as you are setting up the audit tool you’ll be collaborating in—this is typically a shared spreadsheet and vocabulary comes into play in how the columns are labeled and what the terms are that will appear in dropdown selectors for the actual evaluations. Using defined sets of terms will ensure consistency, but even before that, getting to a shared understanding of what those terms means is critical. For example, if you are using a rubric for evaluating content against your criteria that ranks content as good, fair, or poor at meeting that criterion, what does good mean in this context? What specific measures does the content have to meet to earn that rank? Even when you are at the recommendation stage, does everyone agree what “revise,” means, for example? It is generally a good idea to accompany a “revise” rank with another column indicating the type of revision (editorial, design, template, etc.) as well as notes to explain what is being recommended for revision. Keeping in mind that the downstream audience(s) for an audit sheet may be people who weren’t directly involved in the audit helps auditors understand the necessity of being very clear about the rankings and notes they’re making. I typically include an overview tab in an audit sheet that defines all the criteria and the terms used in the columns so that any later reader can understand what it all means.

Project Management

Treating a content audit like any other organizational project, with all that entails in terms of planning, budgeting resources, assigning and defining roles, and communicating progress regularly has several benefits. Not only does it contribute to the likelihood of getting the necessary buy-in from all the stakeholders and participants, it’s a good way to ensure that there is some rigor applied to the timeline, definition of outcomes, and plan for using the information that comes out of the audit process. For more on how to manage a content audit project, see Chapter 4, Planning an Inventory and Audit Project in Content Audits and Inventories: A Handbook for Content Analysis.

Conducting a Pilot

Chapter 11 of Content Audits and Inventories: A Handbook for Content Analysis emphasizes the importance of conducting a small-scale pilot audit to ensure everyone understands the audit's objectives, methodologies, and criteria. This step is crucial in team audits to prevent misunderstandings that may arise from varying interpretations. Work through a small number of pages separately and as a team and compare observations and rankings. Proceed with the full audit only when you’re certain that each member of the team would give a piece of content a similar recommendation. Note of course that some reactions will be subjective and that if you have team members representing different roles, they may come to it with a different perspective—and that’s a good thing. The goal is still to come out at the end of the audit with a set of recommendations that everyone on the team is comfortable with and can explain and justify.

Conducting a pilot not only validates the audit process but also identifies potential adjustments. Regular check-ins, role reassignments, and template evaluations can be refined based on the insights gained during the pilot.a

Maximizing Team Expertise

Role Definition and Alignment

Clearly defining team members' roles, based on their expertise and skill sets, is essential. While there's value in diverse perspectives, aligning roles with individual strengths helps ensure a comprehensive and efficient audit process. As noted above, the value of these perspectives still needs to be incorporated into the shared vocabulary of the final output and shared understanding of the goals and outcomes so that someone from another role could still speak to those evaluations if necessary.

In the absence of a dedicated team, individuals may need to play multiple roles. Establishing guideposts and guardrails becomes crucial, providing a clear structure for tasks, goals, and access to relevant guidelines.

Division of Labor

Deciding how to divide content among team members requires consideration of roles, skills, and content types. Leveraging team members' expertise, such as product knowledge or editing skills, enhances the audit's depth and accuracy. Decide up front who will look at the content and for which specific criteria to make sure that no assumptions are being made and aspects of the content potentially overlooked if there is an expectation that, for example, of course the UX person will note this design issue or that usability problem. Keep in mind team members’ availability and ability to devote enough time to do a thorough job, even if that means giving some members less work than others. A consistent, thoughtful evaluation of a smaller set of pages is more valuable than a rushed effort.

Conclusion: Navigating the Complexities of Team Audits

The collaborative effort of a team audit presents numerous advantages, from diversified perspectives to increased efficiency. However, maximizing these benefits requires a concerted effort to establish shared understanding, define roles, and communicate effectively. By navigating the complexities with thoughtful planning and adaptability, teams can transform content audits into powerful instruments for organizational improvement.