Right Application, Wrong Mainframe
I used to perform large mainframe installations, where these were replacing previous generation machines the customer would usually pay for my team to perform the initial system set up and migration activities and for us to train there staff in things like peripheral set up and comms config to remote sites. We would also hand hold through parallel running of payrolls etc until sign off by the customer. On one occasion an issue was raised as the hardware engineer was physically decommissioning the old mainframe. One remote site was missing all the payroll data for several hundred employees. It turned out the site staff forgot to transfer the link to one site to the new machine. I did offer to try and recover the data from the old disks but this proved to be impossible as the dusk cabinets gad already been disconnected, removed from the data centre and were now upside down in a skip having been pushed off the loading bay We had raised our concerns about the attention to detail of the site team and suggested we managed. All migration activities but the customer did not want to pay for highly priced consultants to manage a set of checklists.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
