Onboarding

In professional services firms onboarding has two flavors. Employee onboarding welcomes the new consultant: it includes tool setup, training on methodology and tools, buddy assignment and shadowing on first projects. Typical time-to-productivity is 4-12 weeks.

Client onboarding is the early phase of a new engagement: environment setup, kickoff meeting, alignment on delivery processes, definition of SLAs and communication channels. A PSA with standardized onboarding workflows reduces new-hire drop-out and accelerates project break-even. Studies show that good onboarding increases 12-month retention by 25%.

Measuring onboarding through a satisfaction survey tends to produce reassuring numbers and no information. The signals that actually predict whether it worked are behavioural and already recorded: how long until the person books their first billable hour, how many questions they still route through their buddy in week six, and whether their first delivery needed rework.

Client onboarding deserves the same scrutiny and rarely gets it, even though the first three weeks of an engagement set expectations for its whole duration. A kickoff that leaves the escalation path, the acceptance criteria and the reporting cadence undefined does not save time; it defers three conversations to the moment when they will be harder, because by then something will have gone wrong.