Working inside a customer team

The advantage of the role is proximity: you see the process, you hear the aside about the spreadsheet, you notice the workaround nobody documents. That only happens if you are physically or persistently present rather than joining a weekly call.

Deliver something small and real in week one — a working search over one folder, a script that does the boring export, a diagram of the current state that makes people say “yes, that is it”. It buys the access you need for everything after.

You will be asked for things that are outside scope, unwise, or both. Refusing well is a specific skill: name what you will not do, name the reason, and offer the smaller thing you will do instead. Then record it in the decision log, so the same request in six weeks meets an answer rather than an argument.

A decision log is three columns — date, decision, reason — and it is the single highest-value document in the engagement. It is also most of the handover written incrementally.

The failure mode of a well-liked forward-deployed engineer is becoming the organisation’s unofficial IT function: fixing printers, holding credentials, being the only person who can restart the thing. It feels like trust and it is a liability for both sides.

Guard against it structurally. Every credential goes into the customer’s own store. Every service has a named owner from day one. Every routine is run by them with you watching before you leave. Module 03 lesson 05 built the routine; this is where you insist somebody else runs it.