Breaking up is hard to do: how to find your perfect mainframe match

By Mark Wilson, Technical Director.

What will you spend your money on this Valentine’s Day? Chocolates? Flowers? Mainframe skills? (With, of course, apologies to those of us who don’t ‘do’ Valentine’s Day at all.) Whatever you choose, it’s always nice to recognise the people we care about. The question is, are you in a professional environment where people whose skills you love, and depend on, are exiting the mainframe team? The truth is, even the best long-term relationships can come to an end.

As experienced mainframers retire or move on, it’s a problem across the industry. The skills shortage continues. But there’s no need to fret: there are plenty more fish in the sea – you just need to be looking for love in the right places, and perhaps cast your net a little wider. This may include working with a provider like Vertali who can provide you with the flexible out-tasking service and skills support you’re looking for.

In terms of dating profiles, the person you’re desperately seeking is probably quite a catch, and therefore much in demand. When a seasoned mainframe professional leaves a team, they often take multiple skills set with them. A major retail client called me up recently. A core member of its mainframe team for more than 20 years was retiring, and they had no-one to take over. This person knew z/OS, looked after RACF, and performed multiple daily operational tasks that kept the service up-and-running. As we know, it’s increasingly hard to find a single person with that broad range of skills and experience; today, you’re more likely to find people with specific skills and specialisms. Anyway, this guy was clearly mission-critical but there was no back-up plan or succession plan. Nobody who could step up in-house, and going external would require more than one person, meaning significantly increased cost. They risked the wheels coming off the bus.

Fortunately, we were able to mobilise fast, and provide a number of talented individuals from our Shared Services Centre, able to handle all the different facets of his role – keeping the lights on, and much more besides. Our flexible engagement model also meant this client was, in effect, still paying for a single expert mainframer. The depth of our talent pool (“plenty more fish in the sea”) and the breadth of our resources enable us to do that.

This flexible out-tasking approach enables you to engage as much or as little as you need. This isn’t about taking over an entire mainframe environment – it’s not a managed service. While we can indeed cover all the tasks of that one “irreplaceable” person, we can also provide expert cover if one or more domain specialists leave the team. This could mean taking on the day-to-day workload of, say, a storage expert one day, a security manager the next, then a systems programmer… whoever leaves, whatever the task, you’ve got it covered.

Okay, the Valentine’s Day link is a bit cheesy. But the reality is that much of life, whether professional or personal, is about relationships: between individuals, and between organizations. Sometimes those relationships come to an end, and we need alternatives. Should the need arise, Vertali can help you “speed date” successfully with more mainframe professionals than you can shake a stick at: forging new relationships to ensure the best support for BAU across the board, and helping deliver essential mainframe projects on time.

Find out about our mainframe skills here and staff augmentation here.