Getting Oriented to Your Client Quickly - Part 2

It’s been a while since part 1 of this piece, so please allow me to refresh your memory. The idea for this article and the previous one came from a presentation Joan Hua made at IAC24 about getting familiar with a new domain quickly, mixed with my own experiences in getting oriented with an enterprise client (which I nicknamed Acme) in my role at Factor. Back in August, I wrote Part 1 with the promise (or threat) that I would return to write the rest. In that article, I advised you to utilize the “Reference Section” - the client’s own knowledge platforms and document repositories - for information to help you get oriented to them quickly.

Tip 2. Add Landmarks, Then Fill in The Map

Landmarks are essential to wayfinding, in both physical and digital spaces. When you are trying to orient yourself to an organization, make sure to record and note your landmarks. Those landmarks will help you build your map as you learn more about the organization and its workings. A “landmark” in this context can be a person, team, business unit, process, or system used as a point of reference by others.

Here’s an example to help clarify. Let's say that you are in an email conversation with a content manager about classification. During the conversation, she mentions that the search engine should reflect some recent changes once PRETZEL has had a chance to run. This is the first time anyone has mentioned PRETZEL, and you have no idea what it does or what its running has to do with the search engine. But it is a point of reference that the content manager is using, and it connects somehow to your work, classification, and the search engine. PRETZEL is a landmark.

For any landmark, make time to learn more about it– even if it means circling back after the initial conversation is done or creating a separate conversation about it. If you can resolve the landmark, it will help you later as you begin to learn and understand more about content processes and the search engine. Make quick notes on it: what the landmark is called, some information about it, and where you learned about it. As you learn more about the client’s processes and systems, the conceptual spaces between the landmarks will begin to fill in the empty areas of your mental map.?

Tip 3. The Contextual Org Chart

I don't know if a large organization could even exist without some form of an organizational chart. Acme’s org chart is linked with its worker database, connecting it to the profile of every employee and making it trivially easy to see their chain of command and determine where they are located in the organization. The issue I run into with Acme’s organizational chart is that knowing a person’s job title and who they report to doesn’t give me any context into how their work relates to mine. For example, if I go to Skip Skipperson’s employee profile, I might see that he’s a System Support Engineer in Marketing Experience. What that doesn’t tell me is that he’s the person I should contact if I need to request a manual sync be run between the enterprise taxonomy system and Marketing’s content management system.?

I’m going to be honest here, my memory is like a sieve. If I have a task I need help with that only comes up every once in a while, I can spend quite a bit of time just searching through old emails to figure out who it was I was supposed to contact for that task and what they need from me to work on it before I can even make my request in the first place.?

That’s why I started building myself a Contextual Org Chart. Just as the general org chart places employees into the context of the corporate hierarchy, the Contextual Org Chart places employees into the context of the systems and processes we have in common. That way if I need to request that manual sync in the Marketing CMS, I can go to my contextual reference and see that Skip would be my point of contact. Creating my own contact reference has saved me enough time and trouble not having to go back through old conversations to justify its own existence.?

The Contextual Org Chart is a reference for your benefit, so organize it in a way that best makes sense to you and keep it in a place where you have ready access to it. The document could be in any format that works for you, from a simple text file to a spreadsheet or even something like Airtable; just make sure you stay within the company’s guidelines for handling employee data. At the very least the Contextual Org Chart should contain the person’s name, the contact information you use to get a hold of them (in most cases, that’s going to be their email address), and some information on what work they do that relates to yours.

So for that Skip Skipperson above, his entry might look like?

Skip Skipperson - [email protected] - Runs manual syncs for Marketing CMS

Make sure to update your document regularly: if your contact changes roles, gets promoted, or leaves the company you’ll want to make sure you update your chart. It’s also a great reminder to make sure you get the information on whoever it is that is taking over those duties.

Conclusion

I hope you found at least a little nugget of something useful in here. If you already do something like this, or you have other techniques that you developed yourself to help you get oriented to a client, I welcome your comments. Thanks!