Best Practices for Owners: How many Owners is enough?
When an APAN community web portal is first created, one person is designated as the Initial Owner. Afterwards, the Initial Owner can grant similar ownership status to others to help administer the community.
So, once new Owners get added to a community, how will you know when you have enough?
Having only one Owner is not practical. At some point, the Initial Owner may not be available, like during travel, TDY, PTO, and sick time. Therefore, having one to two additional Owners as backup is a good practice.
It is important to note — all Owners are still responsible for completing the New Owner Training and submitting a signed Owner Acknowledgement form to APAN.
The upper limit of how many Owners a community has depends on the communication and collaboration between the group of Owners. All Owners must be aware of and agree with the other Owners' actions in the community. All Owners must use the same evaluation techniques for vetting membership requests. All Owners must agree on the organization of content within the group.
Working off the "same sheet of music" is critical for smooth community management and reliable membership approvals. Every Owner must be aware of and in agreement with the actions of all other Owners. All Owners are equally responsible for ensuring the content in the community adheres to all APAN sharing policies, especially CUI restrictions.
APAN recommends no more than five Owners. Experience has shown that accountability becomes almost impossible with more than five people sharing the Ownership responsibilities. While the software of SharePoint and Telligent/Verint does not impose a technical restriction on the number of Owners, APAN strongly recommends a limit that ensures all Owners in a community are in agreement with all other Owners’ actions.
The human element of communication and collaboration is unique to each community, and the trends on APAN have shown that communication deteriorates in Owner groups of more than five people.
Please attend APAN University's Daily Training Webinar for more assistance managing your Owner teams. See the APAN University page for the schedule: https://community.apan.org/support/p/apanu .
Please review the APAN Applications - Generalized Governance for End Users: https://community.apan.org/support/m/info/262852 and the APAN Community Owner Guidelines https://community.apan.org/support/m/info/139431 .
Please also remember to submit questions and issues through an APAN Support Ticket at this link: https://community.apan.org/support/p/contact .
Thank you for your attention,
The APAN Customer Engagements Team