Structured Staff Augmentation: Improve Mainframe
Performance and Availability

Project Description

The client is one of the top bank holding companies in the United States.  Headquartered in the South East, the client operated a primary data center in Alabama and an Active-Passive Disaster Recovery data center in Tennessee.

During this engagement,  eight GTSG resources were assigned to this engagement.  Skills staffed were:

• z/OS ISV Product support
• z/OS Core upgrade and maintenance support
• z/OS Networking (TCPIP, VTAM, Session Monitor, High Availability)
• GDPS (Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex) and Storage support
• DB2 Systems Programming and Physical DBA support
• WebSphere MQ Host (z/OS)
• WebSphere MQ Distributed (Midrange systems)
• Mainframe Technical Project Management

The support model for the client would best be described as a blend of Staff Augmentation combined with the expectation of consulting output in the form of technology improvements.

Our efforts were focused on providing Subject Matter Expert skills in the previously identified technology towers.  In these roles, we were tightly integrated with the current clients staff and management teams. 

We were responsible for our own change and problem management, status reporting, assessing and implementing performance improvements, and providing project planning.

There were a number of improvement whitepapers published by the team during their time of engagement.