Jim Schesvold
Contributor
Jim Schesvold can be reached at jschesvold@mainframehelp.com.
The Many Faces of Application Creation: Part 2
March 16, 2020
This is a continuation of last month’s article, which chronicled application tools and options in context of development projects I’ve worked in and programming alternatives used, including design, coding, and validation. I’ve used various programming facilities, along with their strengths and weaknesses. My experiences start in the early 1970s, and the evolution I’ve experienced spans […]
ArticlesThe Many Faces of Application Creation: Part 1
February 20, 2020
While my career has mostly been consulting, marketing, systems programming and management, I’ve also had numerous engagements in application programming and design. A class in COBOL was my first IT experience, and in my MBA program, I learned Fortran and General Purpose Simulation System (GPSS) in Operations Research classes. In 1975, I rewrote a broken […]
ArticlesLower Levels of IT Managers Should Have IT Experience
January 20, 2020
In my roles as IBM senior systems engineer, and later, IT consultant and project manager, I’ve worked with a wide variety of IT managers, especially first and second level managers. That’s where most of the work is done, where pieces are connected and enabled, yet I found in many projects or development efforts—especially situations involving […]
ArticlesMinimizing Project Plan Delays With Debugging
December 16, 2019
Project planning has been a way of life for me since my career’s early days, learned from an IBM senior systems engineer who was my comrade providing support to a large, leading edge insurance company, driven by their appetite for CICS First Customer Shipment, then Early Support Programs as IBM’s early introduction programs evolved. Project […]
ArticlesThe Benefits of Working Remotely in IT
November 15, 2019
When I was rewriting a student records system for my graduate college, I spent most of time in a tiny room with a keypunch and desk filled with old and new program printouts, plus the punched card versions of each. When I wrote code, it was an instruction per card (or more if putting an […]
ArticlesCapacity Planning and Management: Don’t Let the Tank Go Dry
October 8, 2019
IT computing complexes are fluctuating, growing, evolving entities, characterized by continual, erratic growth, intertwined with shifting business volumes. The long-term trend is continual system growth driven by business volumes, as well as new forms of usage. A daunting challenge for most IT operations is to have a “crystal ball” that predicts IT resource demand growth, […]
ArticlesManaging the IT Project Backlog
September 11, 2019
While IT seems to be an exercise in reading the future and transforming it into business processes, IT often misuses its most vital resource—the people that turn hardware, software and networks into business applications that improve productivity, provide new function, and increase employee effectiveness. Analysts are pulled off projects barely halfway complete, designers are reassigned […]
ArticlesWhen the Phone Rings in the Middle of the Night
August 16, 2019
It’s been decades since I had a 9:00 to 5:00 job, only the earliest weeks of my IT career. Training kept me out of town a lot, and becoming a participating project member took a few months to attain, but once I’d become an accountable project member, my working hours extended into evenings because of […]
ArticlesManagement by Intimidation Is a Formula for Failure
July 16, 2019
Over the decades I’ve seen scores of management staff in action, some competent and motivating, others technology savvy yet people ignorant, some just the opposite, some political and back-stabbing, and some truly cost-obsessed. I spent 17 years with IBM and flourished under their management style, then founded an IT consulting firm. Instead of being managed […]
ArticlesSLAs Simplify Support
June 17, 2019
Service-level agreements (SLAs) were nearly nonexistent when I started in IT. Those of us involved in online systems implementation were too focused on keeping terminal-based applications operational and tolerably responsive to worry about such things; furthermore, no one had heard of them. There wasn’t much pressure for an SLA either, because end users were infatuated […]