Business practice
Training and enablement.
A ramp with milestones instead of a shadowing rota, built on the procedures your team already follows, so new people get productive on a schedule you can predict.
New people learn by shadowing whoever is free, so the standard drifts with every hire.
Shadowing is not a bad instinct. It is just unmanaged. Whoever has capacity that week teaches the version of the job they happen to run, the next hire learns a different version from someone else, and two years later nobody can say what good looks like without naming a person.
A ramp fixes that without turning into a training department. Milestones with dates, built on the procedures your team already follows, so what a new person learns is what your organization actually does. And refreshers pointed at where the work slips rather than at the calendar.
The approach
Three words we work by.
Ramp.
The first ninety days laid out as milestones with dates rather than as a rota of whoever is free. What someone should be able to do unsupervised at two weeks, at thirty days and at ninety, written plainly enough that both the new person and their manager can tell whether it happened.
Build.
The ramp is built on the procedures your team already follows, so learning the job and learning the standard are the same activity. Where a step exists only in somebody's head, that gets written down first, which is usually worth more than the training.
Refresh.
Refreshers are aimed at where the work actually slips, taken from rework, from client complaints and from the questions people keep asking. Training scheduled by the calendar teaches whatever was on the agenda. Training aimed at the slippage teaches what is currently going wrong.
The work
Four workstreams, in sequence.
Ramp design
A ninety day path with milestones and dates, written for a specific role rather than for the organization in general. Each milestone says what the person can do unsupervised by then, so progress is observable rather than felt.
Built on written procedure
The ramp anchored to the procedures your team already follows. Where a critical step lives only in habit, it gets captured in your team's words first, which closes a documentation gap and a training gap in one pass.
Delivery and handover
The ramp run once with a real new starter or a recent one, then handed to a named owner inside your team. The point is that the second time it runs, it runs without us.
Refreshers where work slips
The recurring errors, rework and repeated questions collected and turned into short, targeted refreshers. Aimed at what is actually going wrong now, and revisited when the pattern changes.
Related reading.
All insights
Operations
The two-person dependency test
Pick any critical workflow and ask one question. If these two specific people were both unreachable for a week, what happens. If the honest answer is that things quietly stop, you have found the real risk register of your firm, and it does not appear in
Retention
The six questions that find churn before it finds you
Every firm that has lost a client it did not expect to lose has the evidence sitting somewhere in an inbox. The six questions below take about an hour to work through and they will surface the pattern, but only if you are willing to run them against
Questions
Asked before, answered plainly.
Yes, and it is the common starting point. The ramp needs the critical steps captured, not a complete library, so we write those as part of the work. Most organizations find that piece useful on its own, whether or not anyone new joins soon.
No. It is a ramp your team owns and runs. We design it, anchor it to your procedures, run it once so the gaps show, then hand it to a named owner inside your organization. A course we keep coming back to deliver is a dependency, not enablement.
A checklist says what has been issued. A ramp says what somebody can do unsupervised, and by when. Laptop delivered and system access granted are useful lines, but neither tells a manager whether the person is ready for the work.
It is built per role, not for the organization as a whole. The structure repeats, which is what makes the second and third role quicker to build, but the milestones are specific to the job somebody is actually being hired to do.
Because the milestone says what ready means in terms of work done without supervision, and the manager checks it against that. The judgement stays with your team. What changes is that the judgement is made against a written standard rather than against an impression.