I'm a consultant, the biggest thing to understand is that you don't work for the company, you work for the individuals in the company. You need to immediately start solving what they think is the problem, to build the capital to solve their actual problem.
Ex. Company thinks they need more developers to ship on time (you). First, make sure you're getting tickets done and helping them with the metrics they know, then change the process to fix them for good once you have their trust.
If you skip to step 2, you've got someone angsty with a career on the line who 'isn't getting what they paid for'.
Everything here, but with an important tweak to step 1: it's impossible to know what needs fixed until you've actually gone through the motions of trying things as they are today. It's easy to come in pushing all your 'best practice', but any of it could be a bad idea in any particular scenario, and it's impossible to know without context
I don't think I've introduced anything revolutionary in the last few places I've been (going back ~2 years+), and that's also a fine outcome. Often it turns out that causing disruption to something that works well enough is far more counterproductive than simply leaving things as they are. Save the churn for a big change that really provides an important benefit, otherwise it's not worth the time
Ex. Company thinks they need more developers to ship on time (you). First, make sure you're getting tickets done and helping them with the metrics they know, then change the process to fix them for good once you have their trust.
If you skip to step 2, you've got someone angsty with a career on the line who 'isn't getting what they paid for'.