Jumpstart Series – Understanding the landscape

Starting out on a new assignment is daunting, but can be a great opportunity to plant your roots.

Key Takeaways

When starting a new assignment as a consultant, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the amount of new information. While you are getting to know your colleagues, you’ll likely be drawn into numerous meetings with various departments, such as HR, Technology, Operations, and IT Security. Each group has specific expectations regarding your role and may quickly seek your expertise to address their particular challenges. Communication will often occur through tools with which you might not be familiar, adding to the complexity.

I believe it is essential to stay focused during those initial days and concentrate your energy and time where it counts most. Your client will recognize that it takes some time for you to become fully acclimated, but it won’t hurt to manage expectations and clarify the approach you will take to reach a point where they can fully depend on you.

But where do I start?

I believe that the most important part of a business is the people. Therefore, I argue that you should primarily identify the stakeholders for your assignment and set aside some time to get to know them while building the foundation of a trusting working relationship. This should happen in an efficient, yet personal way. To ensure efficiency, focus on the following:

• Name, role, background
• Personal interests and passions
• The stake they have in your assignment (see stakeholder classification)
• Activities they are working on within the company
• Expectations for collaboration

During these encounters, you will start to understand what everyone around you is working on. This will lead us to create an inventory of all projects that might be relevant for your assignment.

Since you are still navigating the terrain, make sure to ask if there are other people they believe you should meet before ending the conversation. To help you retain this information, take some brief notes after the encounter. Ideally, review all your notes at the end of each day and consolidate the information about the stakeholders you have met, for example in a Stakeholder Matrix.

Bring the objectives to light

Before beginning the assignment, you should have already confirmed the scope of work for which you will be accountable. If you haven’t, it’s advisable to focus on establishing this with the new client. Such an agreement is crucial to maintaining your boundaries and preventing any scope creep that may go unaccounted for in your fees. If your work is billed hourly, this concern is less pressing, as all the tasks you undertake will be compensated accordingly.

Now that you are starting to get an understanding of what the company is doing (or, more specifically, the people supporting the business), you can start to map this statement of work to the actual ongoing projects and activities in the company. Create an inventory of all these projects and figure out all interdependencies that these projects might have. Some will not have any impact on the activities that you will perform, but others might at some point by claiming resources or shifting priorities within the company.

Another important task that you should take some time in is to go through the projects and list the objectives that the project should strive towards. A lot of Project Management Frameworks like Prince2 emphasized periodically validating the business justification of the project. This business justification should be very clear to you so that you can help direct the project in the right direction. If you do not know why a project is being run in the first place, it becomes impossible to keep people motivated, you will use the wrong metrics to monitor the progress, be unable to correctly asses project priorities and thus not provide much value. Perhaps even the exact opposite.

Once the objectives are clarified, some trends might emerge across projects, as some might be striving for similar or even opposing objectives. A project to lower infrastructure costs could run in symbiosis with a project to optimize data format for faster retrieval. However, refactoring a SaaS product architecture for adding new modular features might not go so well in combination with a project to reduce the number of customer support requests on that SaaS solution.

Moving up through the processes

We continue with our bottom-up approach to getting ready for the assignment. We already know the key stakeholders and how you will work with them. We know what projects you will be working on and how these will benefit the business. The next step would be to get a broad understanding of the working environment and its policies.

A good starting point for this is to start consulting the company’s intranet. If there is too much information for you to go through, make use of the network you have already built in the company. Consult them on what policies and documents you should look at. The goal of this phase is to make sure you understand:

• Policies on Security, Compliance and Privacy
• Frameworks used for Development, Project management, Delivery and Service, ….
• Company Processes
• Organization of the Company
• Tools being used

It is important to understand these processes and policies as they will directly influence the best course of actions to complete your assignment. An Agile product-driven environment will require a very different approach from managing a government-led waterfall project. The same can be said about the tooling. It is not hard to imagine that a project management approach using Excel files will have different challenges and outcomes than through the use of dedicated tooling such as Asana, Trello or Jira

What’s next?

Before we move on to the conclusion of this article, I want to point out that the client should still come first. You can clearly state your approach, but if they require you to take some tasks in between, please be flexible and help the client. Additionally, if you identify pain points or risks, inform your client. Propose some actions that can be taken to resolve/improve those pain points or mitigate some of the risk. This will quickly build additional trust and credibility.

In this article, we discussed activities that can be done during the first days on a new assignment. They include getting to know the key stakeholders, identifying project objectives, and understanding the company culture and working environment. In the next article of this series, we will start building our consulting strategy and deepen our relationships with our key stakeholders.