This company that provides repair services is acquired by a larger outfit, and that means the acquiree's systems are being converted to run in the acquirer's data center, reports an IT consultant pilot fish who's on one of the project teams.
"We were converting code from a minicomputer to a set of programming specifications," says fish. "Those specifications would ultimately be replaced by Cobol, CICS and an IDMS database on an IBM mainframe.
"At that point, I had IBM mainframe experience including Cobol, along with some training in CICS, but no IDMS/DB."
Fish's specific assignment is coming along nicely, but other projects aren't so lucky. Case in point: There's an application that tracks the time between calls for service, the service person's arrival at the client, and completion of service. It's been converted, but it isn't calculating hours correctly.
Since the primary expert on this application is on vacation and unreachable, and fish's work is running ahead of schedule, he's asked to lend a hand.
The manager on the project explains the situation to fish, and they talk about the tools involved. Fish is frank about his own limitations: He doesn't know IDMS at all, and that's a major part of the application. But he's willing to take a look at it anyway.
Manager gets fish a set of IDMS manuals and the phone number of someone who might be able to answer questions, and leaves him to work on the issue.
"I started looking at the code, and threw in some debugging statements," fish says. "I soon discovered that the problem was in the control-break logic -- it had nothing to do with the IDMS portion at all. The fix didn't take long.
"In addition to my original assignment, I began performing some overtime work for this manager. I then transitioned to fulltime for him when the original project wound down. Sometimes the best skill to have in this industry is a good attitude and willingness to try."
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