Boris Bosch

When Boris R. Bosch wanted to make a fundamental change in the culture of the database administration department he runs at New Orleans-based Entergy Services Inc., he appealed to both his staff’s pride and self-interest.

He offered them a chance to outshine their co-workers, while developing new skills and earning interesting new assignments. He also got their attention by adding a new evaluation item to the annual employee review.

His problem was persuading a group of individualistic thoroughbreds – the highly skilled, highly sought, senior-level database administrators (DBA) who run the mission-critical operational stores for the electrical power-plant builder and operator – to harness themselves to the junior staff and pass along some of what Bosch calls “tribal knowledge.” For example, Bosch says when he was a staff member himself in the early 1990s, implementing the first data warehousing project for the company, there was so little tribal knowledge about the technology that the team set an especially ambitious deadline.

“I guess we were so stupid that we didn’t know it couldn’t be done in four months,” he says.

But getting his senior staff to coach the less-experienced staff members was difficult, Bosch says, until he came up with a formal mentoring program. “Mentoring is done all the time,” he notes, “but it has not been formalized and turned into something positive.”

He organized the program by assigning one mentor to each new person, or sometimes two mentors if the newbie needed coaching on several applications.

Then Bosch made the effectiveness of the mentoring – measuring how quickly the new people came up to speed on their assigned set of applications – part of the mentor’s performance review.

Each new employee’s first assignment is to document internal processes and any important architectural idiosyncrasies, a task that naturally turns them toward their mentor for assistance.

Getting staff to buy into the mentoring program was easy. Bosch pointed out how the mentoring program offers personal benefits: Without colleagues who can manage their applications, database administrators would be stuck doing the same task forever and would miss chances to join hot new projects.

That was an effective argument, Bosch says. Now the senior staff competes on how quickly their newcomers come up to speed.

Keith Harris, an information technology consultant on Bosch’s staff, says the process of becoming a mentor was aided by Bosch’s open, honest management style, which created a positive culture.

Not only do the participants benefit from the mentoring program, but the department and the company do as well. The database administration department enjoys a highly cross-trained staff, documentation of that elusive tribal knowledge and an average training period that’s brief and thorough.

Entergy ends up with databases and applications that have better architectures, require less maintenance and fail less frequently. Considering the scope of work handled by the database team – 200 database applications – that’s a significant plus.