Documentation / QueryTek Tapestry glossary / Guided Onboarding
Guided onboarding is a structured sequence that takes a new participant from initial setup to working configuration, validating each step as it is completed. The process determines readiness rather than assuming it, so a participant goes live configured rather than merely finished.
Onboarding an organization into a connected system involves a set of tasks with real dependencies: identity connection, organizational structure, permissions, data mapping, verification. Handed over as documentation, those tasks are completed in the wrong order, partially, or with values nobody validated — and the resulting misconfiguration surfaces weeks later as a production problem.
Guided onboarding treats the sequence as a controlled process.
Order is enforced by dependency. Steps whose inputs are not yet established are not offered. This prevents the common failure where a mapping is configured against structure that does not exist yet.
Each step is validated when completed. Configuration is checked at the point of entry rather than at first production use, so an incorrect value is corrected by the person who just entered it.
Completion is a defined state. "Onboarded" means the declared prerequisites are satisfied and verified — a checkable condition, not a shared assumption between two teams.
The distinction from a setup wizard is scope and consequence. A wizard collects input for one feature. Onboarding establishes the participant's whole operating context, including identity and organizational boundaries, and getting it wrong misroutes work or exposes it across a boundary. That is why the validation matters more than the interface.
The measure of a good onboarding process is that support load does not scale with participant count, because misconfiguration was prevented rather than diagnosed later.
Onboarding is where integration cost is decided. If each new participant requires bespoke assistance, growth is bounded by the team doing the assisting, and the tenth participant is more expensive than the first rather than less.
It is also a boundary control. Identity connection and organizational scope are established during onboarding; an unvalidated value there becomes an access problem that is far harder to detect once work is flowing.
QueryTek Tapestry structures partner onboarding so identity and organizational context are established and verified before work is routed, which is what allows adding a partner to be a registration rather than an integration project. Step definitions, validation rules, and partner-specific configuration values are handled within onboarding itself and are not published.
