In this article i gathered together a number of point of attention that I built when I was passing from one client to another. The final scope is giving a track of how to be fast in adapting to the new reality and to build a good reputation for the continuing of the work.

There will be two articles. In this article I will suggest my ideas about how to make a good impression and build a strong reputation that you will use for the next actions. In the next article I will propose an approach when entering in an IT organization.

Coming to the steps.

1) Gather data on the company and prepare yourself

The first step starts even before entering into the company and it consists in self preparation and in gathering as much data and impression as possible about the company. It is important to understand early the key points and what the best way to satisfy them is:

• what are the company strategies
• what are the objectives perceived from outside?
• what are the problems the company is going trough?
• what are the priorities of the company, with regard to our future role?

In order to do this we will have to:

• Read everything that is possible to find about strategy, structure, performances and people (for this linkedin is usually a really good resource).
• Find about outlook on performances of the firm. This is quite important because it gives ideas of how the company is perceived from the outside.
• Look for people who know well the company. For example former employees and clients. Try to discuss with these persons about their idea on the company. If possible speack with the person which we are going to substitute
• Speak with the new boss.
• Prepare a list of topics to dig more once we will start working

At this point we must investigate the operational environment and functional domains that we will encounter. Since we are still not fully engaged, this is a good moment to find any lack in our preparation and to close it. My personal suggestion is to review our managerial abilities, maybe going trough a self-assessment in order to understand where we need improvement. Usually is a good practice to review subjects on team management and some to read some books about trasiction from one role to another.

In the case of IT role, I would suggest to strenghten the following:

• Software engineering, with particular care to estimations and development methods
• Itil and COBIT
• "lean" concepts
• Outsourging and IT services
• New instruments and tools.

2) Define the objectives with our future boss

Before starting a new job or collaboration, we need to have clear what is expected from us and what is the strategy of the company that we are joining:

• What the long term and short term objectives are?
• What the strategies to pursue such objectives are?

It is important that our future boss will clarify these questions, so that we can compare these information with the ones we already gathered in the firt phase. To understand the objectives and strategy will enable us to discuss the other more important:

• What my long term objectives are? What the short term?
• Who will be my stakeholders, (i.e. the people that will have interest in the result of my work)? It is really important to clarify this aspect since it will drive us to identify the groups which we need to take care.
• What will be my position in the organization?
• Who will be the responsible for my evaluation? What will be the evaluation criteria?
• In case of positive result, what is the career i should expect?

Now we must define a list of priorities and specific actions to work on. This is quite important as, when we start a new job, we can find two phasesi: a starting period and a full operational period. Starting period can last from four to six months. In such phase it is vital to obtain visible results (one or two at maximum) to get a serious credibility, which we will us as basys for the next phase.

Define short term objectives is fundamental to get a long and good career in a new company.

My suggestion, at this level, is to start elaborating your own vision to use as a reference for all the future decision. Given the vision, it will be easy to define a stretegy to follow to pursue our objectives.

From this momento it should be possible with our boss to produce a plan containing:

• Activities (what I am supposed to do)
• People 8who is working for me and possible new hiring)
• Finance (what my limits are)
• Business growth plan

Given the initial planning then we will:

• Define the short term actions on people, systems and structures under our responsibility
• Definire our learning agenda

3) Immediate action - Interviews
During the first weeks it is important to build a relationship network both in formal way (meeting) or informal ("coffee break"), in order to get additional information about the company. With regard to this it will be important to keep a series of meeting as earlier as possible  (even in the first week):

• Remember to use an informal approach with the team members (or at least with team leaders) before going on with structured interviews. This allows us to immediately receive feedback about work habits, methodologies, expectations and ideas to improve the situation.
• We should meet HR responsibles, in order to corectly understand the organization chart (real and theoretical) and to get as soon as possible an idea of the hiring process, of training and on the tools we have to influence our resources. We need also to understand what the salary, reward and promotion policies are.
• We need to meet with staff at the same level as our and belonging to the organization which have a role not impacted by our work. We need to start building a network to build our idea of the situation. In particular we need to:

• What about the opinion clients have about us? How do they perceive us? What are their biggest complaints? What are our strengths, according to them?
• What are the most important policies and how do they impact on our work?
• How other groups are organized? What is the methodology they use? What standards? Is it possible to use their approach?

If you work in IT it is also vital to understand logistic, and IT politics like disaster recovery, server management, hardware and software management . If we are entering in a pure IT company my suggestion is to take a look to the check-list"assessment of an IT group". In that checklist there are all the points to go trough in order to assess the status of a team/organization.

If we will be able to complete all the points that I enlightened, then the completion of an action plan should be easy to complete.