---
title: "Best Practices: Clarifying Expectations in Atlan"
url: "https://atlan.com/resources/clarifying-expectations/"
description: "A guide to clarifying how Atlan will be used, covering sources of truth for metadata, contributors and ownership, and rules and accountability for documentation."
---

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**Best Practices: Clarifying Expectations in Atlan.** An Atlan resource page; its description follows under the page's own heading.

## About this guide

This resource helps teams clarify expectations around how Atlan will be used, who should contribute, and how responsibilities should be divided. It poses practical questions with best-practice suggestions to plan governance, ownership, and enrichment strategies.

### Sources of truth

- Manage column and table descriptions in their creation software (for example dbt YAML files) and sync them to Atlan.
- Maintain business terms and KPI metric definitions in the Atlan glossary for alignment and visibility.
- Enrich assets with additional resources such as ERD diagrams or requirements documents, especially for frequently used models.

### Contributors and ownership

- Look across the org chart to identify partners from different teams.
- Assign owners to assets by domain or subject area.
- Use Atlan's Usage tab to find top users as potential owners.
- For larger organizations, distinguish contributor and owner types (for example Technical Owners and Business Owners) with custom metadata, and align responsibilities to frameworks like RACI or CRUD permissions.

### Rules and accountability

- Define when documentation is considered "done".
- Outline responsibilities in a "How to use Atlan" glossary.
- Establish processes for edits and corrections: loop in asset owners for errors and use Jira integrations to manage change requests.

Addressing these questions up front creates transparency, avoids confusion, and builds a scalable governance model in Atlan where roles, responsibilities, and expectations are clearly defined.

## Related resources

- [Use Case Guide: Impact Analysis](https://atlan.com/resources/use-case-impact-analysis) (guide)
- [Translating User Stories to Metadata](https://atlan.com/blueprint-resource-user-stories-to-metadata) (guide)