Some of us have a harder time than others getting things going during the honeymoon stage of our new jobs. There is a bit of a push-pull we feel as we are attempting to get settled in and we don’t quite know how much will be provided to us and how much we should ask. My suggestion is to give a hard sustained push during your first week and really carve out the pumpkin so you can get to working in an effective manner as soon as you can.

Being a project manage-y kind of person, I tend to roll into new business environments with a hunger for a contextually complete view of my role and job functions therein. Below is a quick addendum on some pointers to get yourself rolling into high gear with a quickness.

 

Write down your job functions

Im sure you know what you do, but you don’t want to miss any details and doing this with your direct manager will crystalize the articulation of this narrative. This will be the most important piece of documentation that you will have for the next few weeks and you both must consider this a living document. Even the largest of corporations are not going to have every detail of what you will do mapped out to the letter so managing your on-boarding will be a process for both of you. These details are also subject to change as you learn more about the role and your boss learns more about you. Perhaps you need more training in a certain area, or maybe you need more on your plate to give you 40 hours…

 

Find the Organization Hierarchy Chart. If there isn’t one, build one.

This is especially critical if you are a people manager. Knowing who is above you, below you, and where the horizontal lines are drawn is fundamentally crucial for keeping your processes in order and is great for learning peoples’ names. Gripes go up, managerial direction goes down and collaboration generally goes sideways.

Populate your Calendar with a Daily Schedule Template

This is the essence of time management. It allows everyone on your team to know when you are available for meetings, when you are on the road and gives your boss a quick view of how much time you are spending on what. You will also find it is a useful tool for calculating your productivity quotient based on the time you allow yourself versus how much you get done of a specific activity. IMHO, Outlook is still the best tool for this, having used both Apple Calendar and Google Calendar. Google Calendar is sloppy with timezone management and Apple’s dialog box for appointment instances and managing meeting attendees just doesn’t have it.

Assess the Application / Documentation Repository

Jobs should be a little like technology playrooms and they should all have a huge toy box in the center of the room for you to go digging through. Inside should be an articulated mixed bag of in-house and cloud apps, keys for getting into them and all the docs that you could ever want. You will find things like: Artifacts, On-boarding processes, SLAs, Org Charts, Charters, Project Plans, Custom Built Software manuals, workflow models, PluralSight Free-Trial access cards, jailbroken iPads, etc. Start-upy environments probably won’t have as many toys inside as you might want, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be in there, its just that no one has built up the repository yet. If the toy box is empty, you are probably the founder of the company and you better get started.

Some of my favorites:

Prepare a Growth Strategy for your Process Model

Now we’re really having fun!

Two words for you: scalability.

After you get settled into the swing of things, you should start developing a plan for best handling a strong upswing in delivery volume. This will usually be followed by a rapid influx of new personnel. Having a well formulated strategy in place is crucial for not being crushed under the pressure of this rising tide. Training of new resources should have a calculated process and be well managed. Complex deliveries should have a documented workflow and toolset that can be deployed with little or no supervision. Trainings on your in-house software should be done once and recorded with questions held to the end so that the next batch of new hires can watch it later and get the meat in short order. Politics concerning interactions with specific customers should be discussed in face to face meetings. All of the information needed by someone new to your high-tech assembly line should be bottled, put on the shelf and made available to everyone in the org.

Should you have any questions about ramping up resources or need a deep dive into getting into your groove, be sure to drop me a line.