Lead Time: Getting the Request Before the Start Date

Wednesday, 15:40, at Stonebridge Insurance, where Marta runs a desk of four. An onboarding request has just arrived through the form, every field filled in, for a claims handler called Theo who starts on Friday. Friday is two working days away. The form worked; the person who raised it, Gareth in HR, did everything the desk asked. He did it on the day the contract came back signed, which was today. The offer had been accepted three weeks earlier. Nobody did anything wrong by their own procedure. The desk simply has two days to do a fortnight's work. And the claims team has already told Theo he will be taking calls on Friday afternoon.

Lead time is the number of working days between the desk receiving an onboarding request and the person's start date. It is the one number in this series that the desk cannot improve on its own. The form, the checklist and the profiles are all the desk's to fix. Lead time belongs to HR and the hiring managers. The desk's job is to ask for it and make it easy to give. The desk must show what it costs when lead time is not given, and cope honestly when it is short. This article is part of our Employee Onboarding series. And it is about that ask, the agreement that backs it, and the two-day onboarding that will happen anyway.

It covers why ten working days is the number, then what each amount of notice buys, as a table. Next come the agreement with HR and what the desk offers in return, then the conversation with hiring managers. We cover what the desk does when it gets two days, then the honest conversation about what late notice costs, in hours. Measuring lead time follows, then a short war story and the lead-time agreement to copy, in that order.

Why Ten Working Days

Ten working days is not what an onboarding takes; it is what an onboarding takes when nothing is in stock and one thing goes wrong. The work itself, for a standard profile with a kit on the shelf, is a few hours of desk time spread across the fortnight. The days are consumed by waiting. The desk waits for the directory to settle a new account, and for a kit to be built when the shelf is empty. It waits for a device to be shipped to a site or a home, and for a manager to confirm the profile. It waits for a system owner to approve an exception, and for facilities to issue a badge on their own lead time. It waits for the ready test to be run a day before the start, with a day in hand to fix what it finds. Add those up on a desk with ordinary luck and the total is about eight working days. The other two are for the thing nobody predicted.

The number can be shorter for an organisation with standard kits on the shelf, every starter at one site and no exceptions. And it can be longer for one that ships to home workers or orders hardware to demand. Count your own: take the day-one checklist from The Day-One Checklist. Write beside each line the longest it has actually taken in the past year. Chain the dependent ones, and add two days. That is your ask. Ten is where most desks I have seen land, and it has the advantage of being a number HR can remember.

Ask for the number in working days, not calendar days. A start date on a Monday after a public holiday is a different proposition from one on a Friday. And "two weeks" is a phrase everyone hears differently. Write it as "ten working days before the start date" in every document and every conversation. A tool that keeps a business-hours schedule for its service-level targets, as QuerySolv does, already knows which days count. And the lead-time count can follow the same calendar instead of a separate one.

What Each Amount of Notice Buys

Notice is not all or nothing. The most useful thing the desk can put in front of HR is a table that says what each amount of it buys. Ten or more working days buys the full day one. That includes the profile's kit built and tested, and the full access bundle including exceptions that needed an approver. It includes the device shipped anywhere, the badge and desk in place, and the ready test run the day before. Five days buys the standard day one if a kit is on the shelf. That means standard kit, standard bundle, exceptions to follow, and a home shipment that is tight but possible. In that case, a badge depends on facilities' own lead time. Two days buys a partial day one. That means a spare kit, an account and a mailbox, the standard bundle, and the one system the role uses most. It includes an honest list of what arrives in the following week. The same morning buys a loan device and a working mailbox by lunchtime, if the desk is lucky and the queue is quiet. With that notice, everything else comes over the next week.

The table is the honest version of that paragraph, and it is the thing to hand HR when the agreement is discussed. It is not a threat. It is a description of what a desk of this size can physically do with each amount of notice. And it is more persuasive than any argument about process, because it puts the consequence next to the choice. (The right-hand column is the one people read first. Write it carefully.)

The Agreement With HR

The agreement is one page, signed by the desk lead and the head of HR. It says four things. It says when HR raises the request and what it contains. It says what the desk promises in return and how the two sides will know it is working. The trigger is the accepted offer, not the signed contract, for the reason Onboarding as a Ticket Type gives. The offer is the earliest moment the start date and the role are known. A request that is later cancelled costs an hour while a request that is late costs a day. The contents are the seven fields on the onboarding form. Those two lines are the ask.

The other two lines are what makes HR say yes, and they are the desk's promises. The desk acknowledges every request within one working day with a ready-by date, so that HR can tell the manager and the starter what to expect. The desk gives HR a named contact and a form that takes two minutes. And the desk reports lead time back to HR every month, as a number. That way, both sides can see whether the agreement is being kept and by whom. HR agrees to the ask not because the desk asked nicely but because HR is also blamed for a bad first day. An agreement that makes first days good is in HR's interest at least as much as the desk's.

Get it into HR's procedure as a line, not as a favour. HR runs a checklist of its own for every hire, from the offer letter to the pension form. "Raise the IT onboarding request" needs to be a line on that checklist, next to the step it follows. A request that depends on an HR officer remembering is a request that is raised when they remember. That is when the contract comes back, which is what happened to Marta. A request that is a line in the procedure is raised when the line is reached. The whole difference between ten days and two is which of those two things it is.

Review the agreement once a year, together, for half an hour, with the lead-time numbers on the table. The number says whether the trigger is firing on time, and the exceptions, the starters who arrived with two days' notice, say why. Most late requests have the same three causes. The offer was accepted verbally and nobody wrote it down, the start date was brought forward, or the hire was made by a manager who bypassed HR. Each has a fix, and the review is where the fixes get agreed.

The Conversation With Hiring Managers

Hiring managers are where late notice comes from, and not because they are careless. A manager hires once or twice a year and remembers the interview and the start date. They do not have a procedure for the part in between because they do not do it often enough to have one. They are also the people most likely to bring a start date forward because the team is short-handed. They are the people least likely to think of IT when they do. In their picture of a hire IT is a laptop, and a laptop is a thing that comes from a cupboard. The desk's conversation with managers is therefore not "please remember to tell us". It is "HR tells us, and here is the one thing we need from you".

The one thing is the profile confirmation. When the request arrives, the desk sends the manager a message on the ticket naming the profile HR chose and asking "anything this role needs beyond the standard?". The manager's reply, one line, is their whole contribution to the onboarding, and it is the thing that most often stalls. Give it a date in the message, two working days. Say what happens without it: "If I don't hear back by Thursday, I'll set up the standard finance profile and anything extra will follow as a separate request." That sentence removes the stall. The manager either replies or gets the standard, and either way the kit gets built.

The late-notice manager, the one who messages "I've got someone starting tomorrow", gets a reply that is friendly, specific and does not pretend. "Thanks for letting me know. With a day's notice, here is what I can have ready at nine: a loan laptop, an account and e-mail, and the standard access for the role. The rest, including the claims system and the badge, will follow over the week, and I'll send you dates for each by this afternoon. For next time, HR can raise the request when the offer is accepted and we can have everything ready on the morning." Three sentences: what they get, what follows, and the route for next time. The route is the only part that changes anything, and it is said once, without blame.

Say the same thing every time. Managers who hear "we'll sort it" learn that two days' notice is fine. Managers who hear, every time, exactly what two days buys and how to get ten, learn the second thing. A desk that performs heroics silently is training the organisation to need heroics.

What the Desk Does With Two Days

Two-day onboardings will happen whatever the agreement says, and the desk's response is a plan, not a panic. It means a spare kit and the four things that matter most on the morning. It means an honest message about the rest, and dated tasks for everything that follows. The spare kit is the first move, and it exists only if the desk keeps one built. The arguments for holding a built standard kit on the shelf, and how many to hold for your size, are in The Loaner and Spares Strategy. For lead time the point is that a built spare makes the difference. With a built spare, a two-day onboarding produces a working starter. Without one, it produces a person sharing a colleague's screen.

The four things that matter on the morning are an account, a mailbox, a device and the one system the role uses most. Everything else can wait a few days without stopping the person from working; those four cannot. Do them in that order, because each depends on the one before. Do them on the first of the two days, not the second, so that the ready test can still happen the afternoon before. The second day is for the test and for whatever it finds. A two-day onboarding that uses both days for building has no test. And a two-day onboarding with no test is a morning-of discovery with extra steps.

The honest message goes to the manager and HR on the first day, and it says what will be ready, what will not, and when. The not-ready message in the day-one checklist article is the same message with a shorter list on the left. Then the rest becomes task tickets with dates, linked to the parent: badge by Tuesday, second screen by Wednesday, the exception access when the approver replies. The starter sees those dates in the welcome message and knows that the missing things are coming rather than forgotten. That is the difference between a first week that feels organised and one that feels improvised, even when the same things arrive on the same days.

Protect the queue while you do it. A two-day onboarding takes a morning of one technician's time on each day. It does not take the whole desk, and it does not take the whole day. Claim it, do the four things, send the message, and go back to the queue. The onboarding that swallows the desk for two days is the one that was treated as an incident, with everyone helping and nobody deciding. It costs the queue more than it costs the starter. Two days is enough for a partial day one done calmly. It is not enough for a full one done frantically. And the frantic version produces the rebuilt account on day two that calm would have avoided.

What Late Notice Costs, in Hours

The cost of late notice is paid in hours by four people. The conversation with HR and management goes better when the desk can say whose hours and how many. The numbers below are a fictional desk's, from a year of its onboardings, and yours will differ. What will not differ is the shape. A late onboarding costs more desk time than an early one, not less, and most of the cost lands outside the desk.

At this desk, an onboarding with ten working days' notice took four to six hours of technician time spread across the fortnight. Most of it was in quiet half-hours between other tickets. The onboarding produced one or two follow-up tickets from the starter in the first week. The same onboarding with two days' notice took six to nine hours. That was because the work was done in a rush, the kit was not standard, and the ready test was skipped or shortened. The mistakes that produced were fixed on days one and two. The rushed onboarding also produced four to seven follow-up tickets in the first week, each a quarter of an hour to an hour. Those tickets came as the things that were not ready arrived one at a time. On the desk's side, late notice roughly doubled the time and tripled the follow-up.

Outside the desk the cost was larger and less visible. The starter lost between half a day and a day and a half of their first week waiting for something. For a role on a salary that is paid time producing nothing. The manager lost two to four hours chasing, explaining and finding a colleague's device to share. The team lost the time it spent working around a colleague who could not yet see the shared folder. Nobody counted any of that until the desk did. The first time the desk put it on one line for the operations director, the agreement with HR was signed within the month. Hours are the currency; the method for turning ticket counts into them without inventing anything is in Deflection Math Without Fooling Yourself, and the same honesty applies here. Ranges, from your own tickets, stated as yours.

Say it in one sentence when the moment comes, and let the table carry the rest. "A starter we hear about ten days out costs the desk about five hours and the starter nothing; one we hear about two days out costs the desk about eight hours and the starter most of a day, and we had fourteen of those last year." The sentence is a number, a comparison and a count, which is the shape that gets a decision. The longer version belongs in Explaining Technical Things to Management, where the one-page brief is laid out. Nobody has ever signed an agreement because a desk was annoyed. Desks are annoyed all the time.

Measuring Lead Time

Lead time is measured per onboarding as the working days between the date the request was received and the start date. Both dates live on the parent ticket where they can be exported. Record the received date as the day the complete request arrived, not the day HR first mentioned a name. Record the start date as it was when the request was raised, with a note if it later moved. Each month, the desk reports three numbers to HR. Those are the median lead time, the share of onboardings with fewer than five working days' notice, and the count of those with two or fewer. The median says whether the agreement is working in general; the two counts say how often it is failing badly.

Read the number in quarters once there are enough onboardings, because a desk with four starters a month cannot tell a trend from a bad week. The method for counting tickets so that two people get the same number is in Counting Tickets Properly. Watch for the hiring seasons, too. A graduate intake in September or a seasonal warehouse surge produces a cluster of onboardings whose lead time is set by one HR decision. And one late decision looks like a bad quarter. The clustering is the subject of Trends and Seasonality. The fix is to ask HR for the intake dates a season ahead, which is a different kind of lead time and the easiest to get.

Lead time is one line on the onboarding scorecard, beside the on-time rate and the defects per starter. The whole scorecard, with the review that uses it, is in Measuring and Improving Onboarding. The reason to measure lead time separately is that it is the line HR owns. And a number a department owns is a number it will look at. Show HR the on-time rate and they will nod. Show them the lead time and they will ask who the two-day ones were.

A Short War Story: The September Twelve at Acme

Acme, a software reseller with a desk of three, had run a graduate intake every September for years. Every year the intake's start date had been passed to the desk by the previous HR manager in a June e-mail. That was so reliable that the desk had never written the arrangement down. The HR manager left in the spring, and her replacement inherited a procedure with no line about IT in it. The desk learned of twelve graduates on the Thursday before their Monday start, when a graduate e-mailed to ask which office to report to. The desk had four built spares, so four graduates had a device on the Monday. Four more had one by the Wednesday as kits were built in the evenings. The last four shared with colleagues until the following week while a hardware order that should have been placed in July was expedited. The premium was one the finance director remembered for some time. Ola, the desk lead, counted afterwards. It was a little over forty hours of desk time across the fortnight, against the eighteen or so the previous year's intake had taken. There were also twelve graduates who each lost between one and three days, plus a manager in the sales team who spent the Monday finding chairs. The lead-time agreement was written the following week, with the intake dates as a line of their own. And the next September's intake arrived with thirty working days' notice. That was because the new HR manager, who had been as mortified as anyone, put it in the procedure in June. An arrangement that lives in one person's habits leaves when they do. The only version of it that survives a handover is the one that is written down.

The Lead-Time Agreement With HR

The agreement below is one page, written to be read by the head of HR as a fair exchange rather than a demand. Section 1 is what HR does; section 2 is what the desk does in return. Section 3 is what each amount of notice buys, in the table's words, so that nobody is surprised later. Section 4 is how both sides will know it is working. Section 5 is the handful of cases that need a different trigger. Fill in the names, the number of working days you counted from your own checklist, and the month of the annual review, and get it signed by both sides. A signed page is not bureaucracy. It is the thing that survives the HR manager leaving.

ONBOARDING LEAD-TIME AGREEMENT — IT SUPPORT AND HR — ONE PAGE
Between: ______________ (IT support)  and  ______________ (HR)   In force from: __________

1. WHAT HR DOES
   Raises the IT onboarding request when an offer is ACCEPTED (not when the contract is signed),
   using the onboarding request form, with all seven fields completed.
   Target: at least ____ working days before the start date.
   Tells IT the same day if the start date, role, location or manager changes.
   Includes "raise the IT onboarding request" as a line in the HR hiring checklist.
   For intakes (graduates, seasonal staff): gives IT the intake dates ____ weeks ahead.

2. WHAT IT SUPPORT DOES
   Acknowledges every request within one working day with a ready-by date.
   Confirms the role profile with the hiring manager within two working days of the request.
   Has the starter ready on the morning when the request met the target.
   Sends a not-ready message to HR and the manager the day before, if anything will be missing.
   Reports lead time to HR monthly: median working days, share under five, count at two or fewer.
   Named contact for HR: ______________   Backup: ______________

3. WHAT EACH AMOUNT OF NOTICE BUYS
   ____ or more working days: everything on the day-one checklist, tested the day before.
   5 to ____ working days: standard kit and standard access on the morning; exceptions follow.
   2 to 4 working days: spare kit, account, mail, standard access, main system; rest within the week.
   Same or next day: loan device and mailbox by lunchtime where possible; rest over a week or more.

4. HOW WE KNOW IT IS WORKING
   Monthly: lead-time figures shared with HR.   Quarterly: late requests reviewed together, causes noted.
   Annual review of this page: month ______   Attendees: ______________ and ______________

5. DIFFERENT TRIGGERS
   Internal transfer: raised by HR when the transfer date is agreed, same form, type marked.
   Contractor: raised by the engaging manager via HR, with the end date.
   Return from leave: raised by HR ____ working days before the return date.
   Brought-forward start date: treated as a new request with the notice that remains.

Signed (IT): ______________   Signed (HR): ______________   Date: __________

Marta did the four things for Theo on the Wednesday afternoon and ran the ready test on the Thursday. Theo took calls on the Friday afternoon as promised, with a badge that arrived on the Tuesday and a second screen on the Wednesday. Each was on a dated ticket he had been told about. The agreement went to Gareth the following week with the table attached. He read the right-hand column first, as people do, and signed it the same day, with one change. The trigger line now reads "when an offer is accepted, verbally or in writing". That, he said, was the part HR had been getting wrong, and he would rather it was in print.

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