A provider takes on a new client and quotes a week for onboarding. The client is a thirty person business with what everybody assumes is a fairly standard setup.
Three weeks later they are still discovering things. A server nobody mentioned, two domains registered to a former employee, a backup that has not run since March and administrative access held by a provider who is not replying.
None of this was concealed. The client genuinely did not know, because nobody had ever written any of it down and the previous arrangement never produced a record.
Step 1: treat the audit as the first deliverable
Not as preparation. A documented picture of what exists is a genuine piece of work with real value, and clients understand and pay for it when it is presented that way.
Step 2: start the access work on day one
Domains, hosting, administrative accounts, licences, network equipment and anything with a credential. Access is the longest pole and it should start before anything else.
Step 3: establish who owns what
Domains registered to individuals, licences bought on personal accounts and services signed up for by former staff. Ownership problems are common and take time to resolve.
Step 4: document the network as it actually is
Not as anybody describes it. Physical equipment, connections, addressing and anything unusual. The description and the reality rarely match in an undocumented environment.
Step 5: inventory every device and licence
What exists, who has it, what it runs and when it is due for replacement. This produces both a plan and several immediate cost savings.
Step 6: check the backups and test a restore
Existence is not the question. Whether a restore actually works is, and this check frequently produces the most alarming finding of the whole onboarding.
Step 7: identify the immediate risks separately
Unsupported systems, missing patches, shared credentials and anything exposed. These need a decision from the client rather than being absorbed into a general plan.
Step 8: agree what gets fixed first and what waits
With costs. A list of thirty findings with no prioritisation overwhelms a client and produces no decisions at all.
Step 9: establish the escalation and contact arrangements
Who reports what, how, and what counts as urgent. Doing this in week one prevents the first incident being handled badly.
Step 10: set expectations about the first month
Discovery, documentation and remediation take precedence over routine requests, and clients need to know that before they judge the response times.
Step 11: handle the outgoing provider professionally
Regardless of the circumstances. A cooperative handover saves weeks and the relationship between providers is smaller than anybody thinks.
Step 12: write the documentation so the client owns it
Held by them, readable by a successor. A provider that keeps the only copy has created the same problem for whoever comes next.
Step 13: capture the recurring issues from the start
What the client contacts about most, which is what the following year of the relationship will consist of, and the ground in outage questions that flood an it provider at once.
Step 14: handle the onboarding enquiries without consuming the engineers
An assistant that answers the client's practical onboarding questions, collects the access and inventory information and routes the genuine issues means the technical team spends the first month on the audit rather than on explaining the process. The same structured client start appears in onboarding a new bookkeeping client without chaos, the security concerns in security questions from clients worried about a breach, and the handover mechanics in using the live inbox taking over a chat. See features, start at try, and the sector view sits under it services.