Informing the company
How can I update the CTO that these things should be done before a new hire so they can get on with understanding and working without raising eyebrows that 3 days into new role and he is telling us our issues?
You already are:
Meanwhile I have been asked daily for the report and I say to them that the team is working on fixing the issue about making it work but I still cannot see the website.
You are reporting on the existence of the problem on a daily basis. The company has all the information it needs to understand the problem.
If you were to start telling them what you just asked us about, i.e. "you should do it [this way]", that's overstepping a boundary. You're not in a position to tell the company what they should do. Regardless of you being right or not, you're likely going to be ignored before people even parse what you are saying, and it may even damage your reputation about how to see yourself working in this company (i.e. calling the shots).
But what you can do, is explain to them what issues you've been facing, so the company can come to its own conclusion and realize "huh, we should do it [this way]". This is the safest way in terms of not coming across as wanting to call the shots. Let them find their own answer.
Note that there are middle ground approaches here. Maybe the company asks if you have a suggested solution. Maybe the company is open to you offering a suggestion, if not built on the presumption that the company has to heed it. That's contextual, and very much depends on the workplace culture.
Let the company decide its own solution
You need to keep in mind that your proposed solution isn't even the only reasonable approach.
- Maybe your case is exceptional, and the company rather pays you to sit on your hands for a week instead of paying the cost to overhaul an entire onboarding process to prevent a rare circumstance.
- Maybe the team that should be fixing your issue is horribly underperforming, and maybe that is the more pertinent issue to address here.
- Maybe the team's underperformance is unavoidable (temporarily or not), and therefore it would help to do this in advance
- Maybe the dev team has made the website unnecessarily contrived to get everything up and running, and the company should look at making its resources more easily accessible.
These are all valid solutions, and there's probably others I haven't even thought of.
This is exactly why you need to be very careful about telling someone what "the" solution is, or what they should do. There may be plenty of considerations you're not aware of.
Cover your ass
As a consultant, I often deal with situations where a job I'm hired for is being blocked or slowed down due to some decision that I have no say over.
To use a concrete example, the client I work for has put off writing and implementing a testing suite for a specific module I've been hired to work on. Note that this isn't a bad practice workplace, it's just a very small module on the scale of a company that is innovating across the board. The reason they have put this off is well understandable, it just happens to impact me.
I can keep working, but sometimes hit massive delays because trivial issues have not been caught by the testing strategy that does not exist.
Every time this happens, I speak to the PM. Not to complain, or tell them that they have to build this test suite. I simply let them know that the same problem arose again, and it cost X time extra.
It is up to the company to decide whether they're okay with the lost time. It's not up to me to decide whether the company should invest in the test suite or whether they should be okay with the occasional delay.
But in either case, my ass is covered. If the company tomorrow complains that I haven't delivered my tasks on time, I can point at the issue, and if they would accuse me of making excuses, I can show them a long history of communication with the PM indicating that this issue exists, and the PM telling me that they sympathise with my position but cannot currently help fix the blocking issue.
And that's sort of where it ends. If the company is happy paying for the hours I end up wasting on a preventable issue that the company doesn't try to prevent, then I'm getting paid anyway so I don't need to make a fuss about it.
Your case is just the same. Whether the company is okay or not with you sitting on your hands, is not your call to make. They've been adequately informed, and the decision is theirs.
If you're worried you sitting on your hands is coming across as you being lazy, then make sure the company is informed that you're eager to get started and that the blocking issue is beyond your control. But don't overstep the boundary in trying to fix the company's problem for them (unless it's well within scope for your own work responsibilities of course).
