What to bring to a recovery kickoff
A client-side packing list for the first week of codebase recovery — access, people, and artefacts that save days.
Recovery work stalls when consultants wait on credentials or hunt for the last person who knew the nightly FTP drop. A prepared kickoff is ordinary project hygiene, not theatre.
Access
- Read-only source control and CI history, even if incomplete
- Staging environments that resemble production permissions
- A secure channel for secrets you will not paste into email
People
- A sponsor who can prioritise which failures are unacceptable
- At least one operator and one developer with calendar time booked
- An introductions note for staff who distrust “another IT visit”
Artefacts
- Old installers, VM exports, and runbooks from shared drives
- Incident tickets mentioning shadow scripts
- Prior rewrite proposals — useful as warnings, not as gospel
Send this list with your contact enquiry if you want a faster triage. We would rather adjust scope early than discover a missing archive in week three.