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Role and responsibilities for Mainframe production support


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raghavmcs

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Joined: 14 Jul 2005
Posts: 105

PostPosted: Fri Feb 27, 2009 9:39 pm
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Dear Experts,

This is my first exposure to the role of a mainframe production support.I am working at the client location and about to complete around 1 year in this role.
While working in this role there has been many issues I have came across many gray areas because of the reason there is no clear role and responsibilities defined.Like who is will be doing what,who should be doing any system corrective changes(of program/JCL/Parm) if has to be implemented quickly.Here by who I meant Developers or the prod support....
In nutshell issue handsoff is always a challenging and painfull area.

Many a times while working on some issues the client is even confused for who should be doing what what should be the security acceses and permission which a prod support team should be having...Should prod support team be having the coding permissions?and finally now we are in the process of redefining the boundries and definitions...

I am also a pert of this process and before starting I would like to have the valuable inputs of you experts.I would appreciate if you could assist me as per your experience.
Thanks
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superk

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Joined: 26 Apr 2004
Posts: 4652
Location: Raleigh, NC, USA

PostPosted: Fri Feb 27, 2009 10:08 pm
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This is strictly my opinion of what Production Support should be in an ideal setting.

1. Production Support should have total responsibility for the creation, migration, and ownership of the schedules, JCL and PROC's, Parmlib's, and other batch resources. Both on and off the mainframe. They should have a vested interest in having a smooth-running and error-free environment. They should make sure that all work load SLA's are met for the current processing cycle.

2. They should be the first-line of the triage of a production issue. They should have the ability to handle JCL errors, restarts, etc. They should then escalate issues that need more hands-on resolution, i.e. bad data, missing files, program abends, etc.

3. Program and code fixes should be offloaded to the responsible applications support teams.

4. Access to production data needs to be restricted. Data should be owned by the responsible application support team. There should be a process in place to make a copy of the data available to those teams to initiate a fix without ever accessing the real data.
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raghavmcs

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Joined: 14 Jul 2005
Posts: 105

PostPosted: Fri Feb 27, 2009 10:30 pm
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Superk,

I appreciate your reply.

Still I would need your opinion for the following..

a)Are there any standard guidelines or successfully audited process which can be produced later on before actually implementing any guidelines?

b)On what basis prod support team should be taking up for doing only JCL/PARM/NDM related changes not the code changes...

c)Would be great if you could highlight some gray if you have came across over a period of time for the prod support member role,thanks
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expat

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Joined: 14 Mar 2007
Posts: 8797
Location: Welsh Wales

PostPosted: Sat Feb 28, 2009 2:56 pm
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lso, in a past life, prod support were responsible for testing any changes in a parallel environment, i.e. a complete replica of production. Let's face it one change to one program and the developer is unaware of everywhere it is used has caused oh soooooooooooo many problems in the past.
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