The first thing to do is to get to know the people in your new team. You have to take the initiative; go out to lunch/coffee breaks, introduce yourself (but kee

The first thing to do is to get to know the people in your new team. You have to take the initiative; go out to lunch/coffee breaks, introduce yourself (but keep your ego in check) and ask about them and their work; always be sincere. Find out commonalities and use it to start conversations. Identify the "key" players, in particular; the "Guru" who knows the most about the System Architecture/Code base etc. Ask for a couple of days of his time (eg. brown bag lunches etc.) and request a "Brain Dump". Take copious notes etc. and then sit with the Design/Implementation documentation and Codebase to quickly come up to speed. You can also do the same with each person on your team so that you can quickly catch-up to the status quo.