Confluence Expert

Template 1: Project Kickoff

Project: [Name] | Owner: [Name] | Start: [Date] | Target: [Date]

## Problem Statement
What problem are we solving? Who has this problem?

## Goals & Success Metrics
| Goal | Metric | Target |
|---|---|---|

## Scope
**In scope:** ...
**Out of scope:** ...

## Key Stakeholders
| Name | Role | RACI |
|---|---|---|

## Risks & Mitigations
| Risk | Likelihood | Impact | Mitigation |
|---|---|---|---|

## Milestones
| Milestone | Owner | Due Date | Status |
|---|---|---|---|

Template 2: Architecture Decision Record (ADR)

ADR-[number]: [Short title]
Date: [YYYY-MM-DD] | Status: Proposed / Accepted / Deprecated
Deciders: [Names]

## Context
What is the issue motivating this decision?

## Decision
We will [action].

## Options Considered
| Option | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|

## Consequences
**Positive:** ...
**Negative:** ...

Template 3: Post-Incident Review

Incident: [Title] | Severity: P0/P1/P2
Date: | Duration: | Services affected:
Incident Commander: | Scribe:

## Timeline
| Time (UTC) | Event |
|---|---|

## Root Cause
5 Whys analysis:
1. Why? ...
2. Why? ...

## Impact
- Users affected:
- Revenue impact:

## Action Items
| Action | Owner | Due | Status |
|---|---|---|---|

To install: Space Settings → Templates → Create template → paste structure.

4,000 pages is a symptom, not the problem. The problem is no one owns the outcome of the knowledge base being useful. Governance fixes that.

Ownership model

Space Owners are accountable for space-level health — not for writing content, but for ensuring content in their space is current and owned. One per space, ideally a team lead or department head. They run the quarterly audit and escalate stale pages.

Page Owners are the individual responsible for each page. Not "whoever created it" — that person may have left. Assign page ownership explicitly using a required metadata field. Confluence's page properties macro works well here: add an "Owner" field and a "Last Reviewed" date to every page template. If a page has no owner, it's a candidate for deletion.

Quarterly audit cadence: every 90 days, Space Owners review their space and classify pages. This doesn't mean reading 4,000 pages — it means using analytics to triage.

Page lifecycle

Implement a four-state lifecycle with labels (Confluence's built-in label system):

• draft — work in progress, not official
• active — current, reviewed within the last 6 months
• needs-review — past review date, Space Owner must action
• archived — no longer relevant, moved to archive space

Add the lifecycle state as a label on every page. Pages without a lifecycle label are treated as needs-review by default. The quarterly audit is simply: find all pages labeled needs-review in your space, decide their fate.

Cleanup without reviewing 4,000 pages manually

Use the "traffic + age" heuristic to identify archive candidates without manual review:

In Confluence Analytics (Settings → Analytics, or Space → Analytics → Pages):

• Filter for pages with 0 views in the last 90 days
• Cross-filter for pages created more than 12 months ago

This typically surfaces 40–60% of your stale content immediately. Export the list and sort by last modified date. Pages that haven't been touched in 2+ years and have zero traffic are almost certainly safe to archive.

For the rest, delegate: send Space Owners a filtered list of their pages matching the criteria and give them 2 weeks to classify each one. You're distributing the work to the people with context.

Knowledge retirement checklist

Before archiving or deleting a page, run through:

1. Is it linked from anywhere? (Check Confluence's "Links to this page" in the page footer.) If yes, update or redirect the linking pages.
2. Is it referenced in active processes? Search for the page title in Confluence and Jira. If it's embedded in a workflow or linked from a Jira ticket template, the process needs updating first.
3. Should content be merged? Often a stale page has 3 outdated versions of the same guide. Merge the best of all three into one updated page, then archive the originals.
4. Delete vs. archive: Archive by default. Delete only when you're certain the content has no historical value and is not referenced anywhere. Deletes are permanent in most Confluence configurations.

Templates and page blueprints

The easiest way to prevent future sprawl is to make the right way the easy way. Create a Confluence Blueprint (Space Settings → Blueprints → Create Blueprint) with required fields in the page properties macro:

When someone creates a new page from the blueprint, these fields are pre-populated. The Space Owner's quarterly audit becomes a simple filter: show me all pages where Last Reviewed is more than 90 days ago.

The 5-page rule for spaces

Every Confluence space should have exactly five structural pages. Everything else is content that lives under them:

1. Space homepage — overview, links to key resources, recently updated macro
2. Start here — for new team members or external visitors; the guided entry point
3. Meeting notes — a dated, nested log of all meeting notes for the space
4. Decisions log — a running list of significant decisions with context and rationale
5. Working docs — in-progress drafts, research, proposals not yet ready to be active

Any page that doesn't clearly belong under one of these five sections is a signal that someone is creating content without a home for it. That's usually the start of sprawl.

Run a space audit against this structure: how many of your current spaces have all five? Missing pages are easy wins — create them and reorganize existing content under them in the same session.

What does your current space count look like, and do you have a single "catch-all" space that's absorbing everything?