A few years back, a client requested our help in upgrading CICS on their mainframe. The client was in the public sector and their staff CICS Systems Programmer had been with the company for the last 15+ years. Their resource wanted to be involved in a couple of areas of the upgrade. Our consultant had at that time in excess of 20 years working with CICS.
We worked with their CICS person to determine what areas of the effort they would like to be involved in while writing up the statement of work (SOW) and assigned to them what we estimated to be about 40 hours of the effort. These 40 hours would be spread over the course of a month and should not interfere with their day to day activities.
During the review of the SOW with the client via conference call, we reached the section that explained the work that was delegated to their internal CICS resource. At this time, their CICS person, to be mild, basically unraveled. They stated in no uncertain terms that the amount of the effort assigned to them would take at least 4 weeks to complete with all of their attention focused on it and that we were being unreasonable in our expectations. We tried to assuage their worries that we would be working alongside them and giving them assistance when they needed it.
Suffice to say, we did not win the opportunity and the client went another route.
We at New Iron have found that this appears to not be uncommon in many environments. Companies have internal resources that have worked in only their system for many years and are in a comfort zone. The resource does a great job of maintaining and remediating issues in their environment, but when they are asked to do a new task or confront a new challenge their abilities are stretched.
Even with yearly training, it is difficult to pick up on tips and tricks that make maintaining and upgrading your mainframe software easier. Often times, an outside consultant or company has completed the upgrade you are looking to do and knows the mistakes to avoid.
If you have a question, a comment, or just want to see who we are, please feel free to call 1-844-388-IRON (4766) or email us. We would love to hear from you!
