Content-owner interviews are the fastest way to get an overview of an organization's content, its current state, what's planned, and how it actually gets created and maintained. You talk to the people who define, own, and manage that content: business leaders, content managers, strategists, creators, and editors. Questions typically fall into a few categories: planning the content, understanding what already exists, how new content gets created, and how the broader content-management process works.
Individual interviews and group discussions each offer something different. Individual sessions surface a person's unique perspective without the influence of colleagues in the room; group discussions move faster and reveal how people with different roles actually negotiate disagreements, but the result reflects group consensus rather than each individual's honest view. Combining both approaches, some individual sessions, then a group discussion, captures the benefits of each.
Whoever you interview first will shape what you think you understand about the content, which is exactly why talking to only one type of stakeholder is a risk, not a shortcut.
Focus on planning and content-management process questions with the head of internal communications. Her role gives her visibility into strategy, governance, and how content decisions get made across the organization, exactly the categories of question the source material associates with business leaders and content managers. The department heads, in their shorter thirty-minute sessions, are better positioned to answer detailed questions about the specific content their own areas own and maintain.
A contradiction between stakeholders about content ownership isn't something to resolve by picking the more senior or more confident answer: it's itself a finding. Disagreement about who owns a content area often means the organization's actual governance is unclear or inconsistently understood, which is exactly the kind of structural problem the interviews are meant to surface. The consultant should record the contradiction as-is, note it as an open question, and treat resolving it as part of the deliverable, rather than quietly picking a version and moving on as if the organization already had a clear answer.This matters because papering over a real ownership gap early would mean building an information architecture on an assumption that turns out to be false once implementation begins, a far more expensive place to discover the same contradiction.