Cash cow for external companies and contractors - Project Manager-IT Entergy Employee Review

1.0
8 June 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

sometime you get good people to work with

Cons

In order to effectively carry out your responsibilities within the designated territory, it will be necessary for you to relocate. This company appears to have a mindset rooted in outdated practices reminiscent of the 1950s. There seems to be a resistance to embracing change, as evidenced by their engagement with three prominent companies for transformation efforts over the past three years. The primary obstacle lies within the upper management, who have been steeped in traditional methodologies from the past. As individuals ascend the corporate hierarchy, a detrimental mentality becomes pervasive. No one will leave because of the very good pension plan. A lot of managers left when they hit 55 and the market was bad in order to save their nest egg. The company's focus appears to be solely on monetary gains, as exemplified by their manipulation of quarterly budgets to present favorable outcomes to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) at the end of each reporting period. It is not uncommon for certain departments' funding to be reduced artificially in order to create the illusion of increased cash flow. This approach compromises the department's ability to operate effectively. As a member of the IT team, I have encountered significant challenges while attempting to introduce improvements. When confronted with these proposals, the response from managers has consistently been, "We have always done it this way for the past 25 years." The technological infrastructure of the company is in disarray, necessitating the engagement of external entities such as Accenture and Leidos at substantial financial cost to patch up the existing deficiencies. The Information Technology (IT) department is severely underfunded for transformational initiatives, resulting in a cycle of temporary fixes to address ongoing issues.

Explore other reviews about Entergy

5.0
24 June 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Good company to work for

Cons

Dumb management ignorant people but that’s anywhere

2.0
28 June 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Good pay, generous bonus program Health insurance is pretty good Profit sharing contribution to retirement every year in addition to regular 401k match Strong financial outlook for the company

Cons

Over reliance on vendors/contractors. Over the years, IT leadership has outsourced so much of our technical knowledge to where vendors can extort us for any dollar amount. Even my own team is not immune from this. I always have to deal with vendors to do most work on the applications that our team is responsible for. I have a lot of knowledge about our applications and how Entergy uses them but I always feel like I have one hand tied behind my back dealing with the vendors. They've been redoing all of their project startup and PMO processes with a consulting firm over the last few months and it's going terribly. I've attended all of the trainings and the information that they've provided gives us no guidance on what we're supposed to do and how we're supposed to do it. The consultants that do this training name drop the CIO all the time during the trainings and working sessions almost like it's a threat (apparently the owner of the consulting firm and the CIO are old friends). I asked my manager if we could just use the old process since we already knew it but was told that we could not. It kind of feels like they're going to outsource the project managers and the PMO again just like it was years ago when I first started here, so that'll be one more thing that we're stuck with dealing with a vendor on. The company has a lot of really good growth potential right now with all the data center work happening in our region, so maybe this has something to do with this, but it seems like IT is constantly doing re-orgs. I've been lucky to have not been too directly affected by them other than our group reporting to a different VP, but a lot of my friends on other teams feel like they're constantly getting passed around and a lot of people are starting to question whether the CIO and his lead team actually know what they're doing. They introduced an initiative earlier this year for all of us to come up with ideas for ways to cut down on hours of labor using AI. The leadership team is framing it as a way for us to free up time to work on other things, but with all of the news about companies laying people off because of AI, most of my teammates assume that these efforts are setting the stage for them to do that to us too. Teams often feel like we're working against each other and not with each other. The team I'm on gets along great, but there is constant finger pointing between application teams, infrastructure teams, networking teams, security teams, project managers, etc. And the sad thing is that the managers, senior managers, and directors are the worst at it. They do a horrible job of leading by example.

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