What should technical leadership deliver in the first 90 days? — answered by Engineer Saeed Baatiah
Agree this in writing before signing, or ninety days pass in “getting to know the situation”. What is realistically expected: an inventory of your systems, contracts and subscriptions with their costs; a written risk assessment (backups, single-person dependencies, expired contracts); a priority list ordered by impact; and a plan for the next ninety days. Those are four tangible outputs you can judge with no technical background.
A written agreement on ninety-day outputs protects you both: it protects you from ninety days spent “getting oriented”, and protects them from expectations never voiced. And all four outputs are judgeable with no technical background — the inventory reads as a list, the risk assessment as ranked concerns, the priorities as an ordering, and the next ninety-day plan as a commitment.
And what you should not expect in the first ninety days: large system changes, replacing vendors, or rebuilding anything existing. Someone who starts by demolishing what they found before understanding why it was built that way creates problems that did not exist — and many “bad” decisions in old systems were reasonable decisions under constraints no longer visible.
And an early indicator worth watching in month one: do they talk to the staff who use the systems daily, or do they read documents and meet only with you? Someone who does not ask users will propose solutions to assumed problems rather than real ones — and that difference is the difference between a project that works and one abandoned after launch.
- Agree the outputs in writing before signing
- Inventory, risks, priorities, plan — all readable with no technical background
- Do not expect demolition or replacement in the first ninety days
- Watch: do they talk to users, or only read documents?