Concepts: Mentoring
Topics
What a Mentor Does 
A mentor is someone who teaches and guides the project teams about what they need and when they need it. Typical ways of mentoring are:
- Workshop leader. Some activities are best performed in a group; for example, finding actors and use cases during use-case modeling. Throughout such activities, it's valuable to have a modeling leader who is a process expert. An experienced modeling leader can save a lot of time and effort.
- Process expert. The process expert is an on-site support person for the project. The process expert's task is to help the developers use the process and model as well as possible. If the process expert detects any problems due to lack of knowledge among the developers, the process expert is responsible for filling that knowledge gap on the project team.
- Project manager support. A process expert can help the project manager to plan and steer the project. Sometimes the project manager has little or no experience about the process in question.
- Reviewer. A cost-effective way to transfer knowledge is to have a process expert review the results of each phase. A review often reveals any problems the members of the project may have with how they use the process. Of course, the process reviewer does not replace any of the regular reviewers with their domain and technical expertise.
Effects of Mentoring
There are several good reasons to have one or several experienced mentors on the project. A mentor can:
- Give a project a kick-start.
- Drive the project's use of the process.
- Be a cost-efficient way of transferring knowledge.
A good mentor becomes dispensable because the goal is that the project will become independent of the mentor. However, it is not trivial for a mentor to become indispensable. There is a risk that the project will become too dependent on the mentor taking care of all problems and difficult tasks, rather than the project team solving them. People on the project need to be given the responsibility for taking over the mentor's tasks, especially ownership of the process.
Be aware that there is a built-in conflict between the goal that the mentor should become dispensable, and the project manager's short-term goal of successfully finishing the project.
Making Good Use of a Mentor
Experience shows that having a mentor is very important to process implementation success. Without a mentor, there is no process driver and, in many cases, this means that the whole process implementation could fail. This is a common problem.
However for long-term success, it's important not to rely on an outside mentor. Therefore, you need to plan for transitioning the mentor's role to people within the organization. Assign someone in the organization to become the expert and to learn from the mentor.
One potential problem is that the mentor becomes a resource on the project and cannot focus on the mentoring tasks. Therefore, it must be made clear that the mentor only does short assignments, such as:
- Supporting the project manager
- Reviewing
- Leading workshops
