Two things usually: confirming the required continuous year of qualifying employment abroad within the relevant preceding period when the record includes secondments or prior US time, and retrieving evidence from systems and people the company has moved on from. Neither is fast, and both come before drafting.
Sequence the history check first
Run the employment-history question before anyone writes a role description, because an unexpected break can change the whole plan. Then set dates for record retrieval, manager statements, and legal review, and treat petition approval, visa issuance where applicable, admission, and the lawful start of work as separate later steps. Avoid promising the receiving team a start date that assumes each step lands on schedule.
Retrieval has a dependency order worth writing down. Employment and payroll confirmation comes first, because it is the item most likely to end the plan. Archived project records come next, since they take longest and often depend on people who have moved on.
Manager statements come last, so that they describe records already located rather than standing alone as memory. Hypothetical example: a food-safety systems specialist's team plans a six-week evidence window, then discovers two of the three named managers have left the company, converting a retrieval task into a search and adding a month before drafting can start. Sequencing this way makes a blocking fact appear early rather than after drafting has been paid for.