The instinct, when leadership decides it's time for a real global mobility program, is to start with a vendor RFP. That's the wrong place to start. You don't know what you're buying until you know what you're trying to govern, and you can't govern what you haven't written down. This is the order I use when building global mobility programs from scratch — what to do in the first thirty days, the next thirty, and the last thirty before the program goes live.
Weeks 1–2: Discovery and stakeholder alignment. Interview HR, Legal, Finance, Talent, and a sample of mobile employees. Read every existing policy, even the unwritten ones. The goal is a clear-eyed picture of what's actually happening, not what the org chart says.
Weeks 3–4: Policy design. Write the four documents most mid-market companies need: assignment policy, transfer policy, business travel guidelines, remote work framework. Keep them short. A 12-page policy that gets read beats a 60-page policy that doesn't.
Weeks 5–6: Vendor RFP. Define what 'good' looks like, write the brief, talk to three to five providers. The right answer is not always to switch — sometimes it's to renegotiate. Either way, the RFP is what gives you leverage.
Weeks 7–8: Governance and workflow. Decide who approves what, by what threshold, in what tool. Wire it into your HRIS so it can't be skipped. Approval workflows that live in email do not survive contact with growth.
Weeks 9–10: HR enablement. Train the people who'll run this when I leave. Write the playbooks. Build the case templates. The handoff starts now, not at the end.
Weeks 11–12: Soft launch and handover. Run live cases under the new model with me sitting next to your team. Adjust. Document the adjustments. Walk out cleanly.
At the end of ninety days, you have a function. Not a perfect one — that takes a year of running it — but a working one, owned by your team, with the documentation to keep it running.