Post By Martin 4 Comments
May 2007 08

How to introduce a new member to the team

Chris called me up. I officially labelled him as the new guy, as he’s started his new role, so as part of this re-labelling, I called him up and asked how he was getting on.

“Fine, but I need to get my pc rebuilt which is set to take a few days, and my login doesn’t work.”

“What you doing then?” I asked

“Reading the documentation, you know, doing my best to look busy, there’s not much I can do, they’re not going to let me do anything when I haven’t got an account. It’s been chased but you know.” Replied Chris.

In the meantime, a few suggestions on things to show Chris/new guy:

  • What’s the helpdesk number?
  • What’s the operations number?
  • Who owns what systems?
  • How does support work? Are we infrastructure support or do we also help with applications?
  • What’s the change process like – who owns it – who are the change team?
  • What are the key applications/infrastructure that new guy is working on?
  • How do you deploy/build a server?
  • What issues are we having right now? Windows 2003 migration issues? Virtualization issues

It’s going to depend on the size of the business the role etc, but the more you can get the new starter up to speed, the more they can get involved and add value to the team, the old saying information is power, is true to a certain extent, if I know the boundaries get and understanding of how things work, I can start getting involved and working on delivery..




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4 Comments

  1. ST2 says:
    May 9, 2007 at 08:39

    Oh the days when I was “New Guy” and someone who started a couple of days after me was “New New Guy” hehe

    And yep we’ve all been through reading Server Build Docs etc etc

  2. ST2 says:
    May 17, 2007 at 09:10

    Well yesterday we had a Video Conf to meet some new staff “New Guy” and “New New Guy” – they both reside at our offshore facility but should be here with us for some knowledge transfer (3-6mths) in a few weeks once Visa’s are sorted.

    They replace old guy and old old guy who where with us for about a year, got trained up and then both decided to leave … did we get used????

  3. martin says:
    May 17, 2007 at 18:13

    Introducing a new team member properly though is important on a serious note. Empowering them with the right information can be the difference between an effective energized member of the team, or someone sitting reading the documentation bored, waiting for something to happen.

  4. ST2 says:
    May 13, 2009 at 10:30

    Oh the days when I was “New Guy” and someone who started a couple of days after me was “New New Guy” hehe

    And yep we've all been through reading Server Build Docs etc etc

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