Client onboarding, rebuilt
At an MSP serving enterprise and mid-market clients, onboarding ran on tribal knowledge. I helped build the Projects team that replaced it with a repeatable system, and onboarding timelines came down by more than 25%.
- Role
- Solutions Engineer, Projects team · QIT Solutions
- Period
- Nov 2023 – Oct 2025
- Type
- Operational redesign
The situation
Every project worked out its own process from scratch. Context kept getting dropped in the handoffs between sales, projects and support.
How I got there
I joined as a technical account manager: renewals, upsells, six-figure multi-year contracts. I kept recommending projects, scoping them, and then doing a good chunk of the work myself. Eight months in, the company asked me to help build a dedicated Projects team around that.
On that team I was the project manager’s technical right hand: I scoped the work, ran discovery, did most of the engineering, and wrote up everything support needed to take it over. I was most of the layer between the clients and the support team.
What changed
I carried each project from the first discovery conversation through to close.
Statements of work written to one standard, instead of each project starting from scratch.
A defined path between sales, projects and support, so context moved with the work.
A regular rhythm for talking to the people signing, rather than updates when someone asked.
Everything support needed to take the result over, written up as part of the project.
Result
Onboarding timelines came down by more than 25%. It’s the figure on my résumé for that role.
I wrote about the first thing I standardized, and why: The first thing I fixed in client onboarding.
Through the Foundation Layer
The symptom showed up as slow onboarding, which reads like a delivery problem at L4. The cause sat lower: no defined operation for moving a client from signed to supported (L1), and nobody able to see where a project stood or who owned the next step (L3). Fixing those two is what brought the timelines down. The Foundation Layer.