Corralling Institutional Knowledge by Recycling the Workforce

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Corralling Institutional Knowledge by Recycling
the Workforce

• Or
• What I Had to Learn to Stay Employed!!!

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September 2004

• Merger of legacy staff from DHS (including
  shadow IT) and HHSC
• Overlapping applications maintained by staff with
  a hodge podge of tools including Unisys COBOL,
  Access, Websphere, Oracle, Sybase, and
  proprietary tools
• 75 of staff were mainframe programmers
• Direction to complete migration off mainframe

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Mainframe Programming at DHS/HHSC

• Staff were knowledgeable about business areas
  supported
• We needed to retain the business knowledge while
  moving forward
• Many staff had expertise limited to one core
  function batch, DMS vs. RDMS, screens
• Skeptics resisted change because we would never
  get off the mainframe

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Like a brush fire in the west only two choices
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Saddle up and beat the storm

• Or stay behind.

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Management Concerns

• Staff had to make transition to new world
• Budget was limited as was time
• Overcoming resistance to change
• What if some people simply could not convert to
  new tools
• Tenured staff with program knowledge that would
  be lost
• What would happen to these staff

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Retooling or Rethinking
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Transforming Staff

• Knowledge transfer by staff augmentation
  contractors and state staff with current skills
• Voluntary self improvement/education
• Formal classes (St. Edwards)
• On-line self paced courses (MindLeaders)
• Organized lunch and learns
• Informal classes

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Informal Classes/Knowledge Transfer

• Contractor to one or two staff
• Very targeted subjects such as relational
  databases and data modeling
• Very targeted work related to current projects
  exercise actually project work

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Lunch and Learn

• You give me your lunch hour, Ill give you one
  hour of my time
• Originally designed for one team, expanded to
  others

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Meet Michele

• Michele works hard for her yearly cruise
• Experience on financial and payroll systems
  replaced by PeopleSoft
• Had understanding of the interaction of HHS
  programs (Medicaid, Finance, etc)

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Micheles Observations

• It has been a busy 2 1/2 years, since migrating
  from the mainframe to open systems
• Mainframe knowledge was routine, repetitive
• Open systems is a constant learning experience
• The transition to data center services adds
  complexity to the learning process
• Has attended 80 hours of JAVA classes
• Appreciates the lack of file size limitations of
  mainframe programming had to guess file size
  and allocate appropriately
• Has increased her analytical skills
• Has independently coded a JAVA program for a
  large system and program is in production

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Meet Jeff

• Jeff would rather be riding any day
• Experience on batch processing on mainframes back
  to punch card days
• Thought a mouse was what you fed cats and snakes

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Jeffs Observations

• From first programming job in private sector
  using punch cards and magnetic tape drives has
  27 years on mainframe
• Mainframe used fewer tools primarily COBOL and
  ECL/JCL and lots of file dumps for
  troubleshooting
• Web environment uses multiple tools and objects
• Many free tools are available to help the
  developer
• There is more than one way to complete a given
  task
• Team efforts are more effective
• The Internet provides so many resources for
  debugging and learning

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Meet Lucius

• When not programming, Lucius likes to go to car
  shows
• Was a C programmer that transitioned to COBOL
  and back
• Experience as a computer operator at a bank

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Lucius Observations

• Works on a major system that has always been a
  grizzly bear of information and size
• Had spent time programming parts of system in
  MS-SQL change of direction to Java
• Self-enrolled in night classes in Java
• Java felt like C helping him transition
• Was able to compare Java code to mainframe code
  for testing
• Likes getting e-mail confirmations when
  processing completes and text messages from
  program problems that are detected earlier

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Sudip ---Nareen--- Niranjan

• Sudip likes to Hike and play Indian Classical
  music
• Nareen spends his free time with diapers
• Niranjan enjoys table tennis and action movies

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Examples

• Provided day to day knowledge transfer
• Helped staff grasp concepts of client server and
  the various layers
• Concepts of multiple users accessing the same
  data
• Avoiding duplication and understanding
  normalization
• One on one database and data modeling concepts
• Formal classroom lunch and learn
• Formal oneday class in Java Server Faces

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Outcomes

• Management Concerns
• Staff had to make transition to new world
• Budget was limited as was time
• Overcoming resistance to change
• What if some people simply could not convert to
  new tools
• Tenured staff with program knowledge that would
  be lost
• What would happen to these staff

• Reality
• One staff member applied and transferred to
  non-programming job
• Several staff have moved to non-coding functions
  testing, documentation
• Lunch and learn, Mindleaders, self education help
  stretch dollars
• Staff have adapted and management recognizing
  where skills are more easily transformed