The first two weeks with a new placement

The placements that work out are the ones where week one is about access and watching, not training. Here is the shape that has worked best across our clients.

Day one: access, not training

Have the accounts ready before they log in. Email, Slack, the help desk, the repo, the password manager, and whichever internal tool nobody remembers to mention. We send you a checklist a few days ahead for exactly this.

Then introduce them to the team in the channel where the work happens, not only in an onboarding call. A specialist who has read three weeks of a Slack channel knows more about your business than one who sat through a deck.

The first piece of work

Give them something small and reversible on day four or five. A single ticket, one reconciliation, one section of a page. Review it properly and tell them what to change, including the small things. The first review sets the standard for every review after it, and specialists tell us they would rather be corrected in week one than in month three.

The day ten check-in

We talk to you and to them separately around day ten. Separately, because the thing that is bothering one side is rarely something they will say in front of the other. Most of what we fix at this point is a missing piece of context, not a people problem.