Assessing Key Performance Areas to Create an Agile z/os Batch Environment

Assessing Key Performance Areas to Create an Agile z/os Batch Environment

The Key Performance Areas for the Batch JCL Environment provide a means for identifying, validating, and measuring those things that must go right to ensure a Cost Effective JCL Environment. These measurements provide a basis for analysis and improvement of processes, procedures and the JCL assets that support and control mainframe production quality, costs and effectiveness. Best Practices Management of JCL assets and effective use of JCL related tools have paid unexpected, large dividends to many organizations. An inefficient JCL environment has been shown to drive the creation of highly non-productive and dangerous workarounds with an increase in the risk of production operation failures. Additionally, long-tolerated inefficiencies result in wasted computing and personnel resources and an unnecessarily high cost of processing the batch workload. For over thirty years, SEA has been providing technology and services that assist data centers throughout the world to more effectively manage their batch JCL environment. Over that time, we have identified the following focus areas that can provide insight into the level of maturity and subsequent degree of agility of the batch environment: 1. Production effectiveness and efficiency of the production environment involving JCL Abends, restart/recovery, and needed production job information. 2. Standards Status of standards, enforcement, consistency, usefulness. 3. Optimization Condition of JCL assets involving obsolete JCL, inefficient JCL. 4. Lifecycle Efficiencies / Level of Automation in moving application JCL from Dev to Test to QA to Prod. 5. QA Effectiveness and efficiency of QA related to JCL asset management. 6. Environmental Knowledge Documentation and focus on metrics providing visibility of JCL related production failures and causes. 7. Processes Measures of time spent by stakeholders on JCL related activities. 8. Use of Technology JCL asset management tools utilization and effectiveness. 9. Training Need for JCL environment related education and training. 2

Armed with metrics from the above areas, management and other stakeholders in the JCL environment are able to clearly evaluate problems, identify solutions, develop priorities, and evaluate potential returns on assets that specific improvements would deliver. Resulting benefits can include: Reduced costs of the development to production lifecycle. Reduced number of JCL related production failure/restart incidents. Improved efficiency of the batch window. Improved quality of the development to production lifecycle. Identification and elimination of production operation risks and service delays. Improved utilization of JCL asset management tools and processes. Reduced focus by application staff on JCL, with increased focus on development. Each of the 9 critical areas listed above should be assessed on a periodic basis to determine where improvements can be made to ensure that quality and effectiveness objectives are being met. The specific metrics for each area will vary, and the more thorough measurements will consider the perspective of various functional areas (i.e. Production Operations, Applications Development, Management, etc.) to get a true understanding of the maturity level of the environment. Listed below are samples of the types of questions that need to be answered for each critical area. The metrics that are developed and captured to answer these questions provide an accurate gauge of the maturity level and subsequent agility of the batch environment: Production Is the production service delivery consistently meeting ALL needs and expectations? (SLA s, availability, agility, etc.). Are production Abends a frequent and serious occurrence? Are current production JCL-related Abends causing any meaningful business impacts? Do Operations personnel have easy and timely access to all the information required to start and keep applications running? Do Operations personnel know the critical path flow(s) of the batch process(es) and the related priorities and impacts of Abends on downstream SLA s? 3

Standards Are JCL standards (such as naming conventions and JCL parameter values) well defined? Are JCL standards effectively communicated? Are JCL standards effectively enforced within the Development and Production Support organizations? Is JCL Standards compliance automatically validated during the promotion to production process? Optimization Has production JCL been analyzed and optimized for maximum efficiency? Has obsolete and/or duplicate JCL been removed from all JCL libraries? Lifecycle Is the Development to Production Lifecycle (processes and procedures for moving software from development into production) accurately documented and communicated? Is the Development to Production Lifecycle effectively enforced? Are the development to production Lifecycle processes automated (minimal manual interventions)? Is the Development to Production JCL Lifecycle effective in efficiently supporting a DevOps approach in Development, Testing, and promotion to Production? QA Does the Production Support (or QA) function have complete authority to accept or reject application JCL changes into production? Is the utilization of JCL-related QA processes across development teams highly consistent? Do JCL issues cause additional time and effort to be expended during the QA process? 4

Environment Knowledge Are metrics on production JCL Abends collected and reported? Are the costs of JCL errors documented and tracked? Is documentation available that accurately identifies components within the production JCL libraries (Jobs, Procs, Datasets, etc.) and their relationships to batch Jobs/Applications? Processes What is the average number of migration packages and elements (or simply changes) you are involved in processing per month? What is the average time you expend per month to prepare and validate JCL for development and testing? What is the average time you expend per month to prepare and validate JCL for production? What is the average time you expend per incident to recover from a production JCL failure? Use of Technology How quickly and easily can you thoroughly validate JCL? How quickly and easily can you make mass changes to existing JCL? How easily are you able to perform impact analysis on JCL changes - i.e. what effect your changes (PROC mods, Name Changes, etc.) have on other batch components? How well are JCL management software tools integrated with scheduler and SCM software? Training Have all Production Support and Development personnel responsible for batch processes been effectively trained on how to use batch and JCL validation software tools? Is new and/or refresher training easily accessible for all JCL and batch process personnel? Is knowledge about the current batch and JCL environment and applications well documented and easily accessible? How much time and effort are expended due to inadequate training? 5

It is well understood that the mainframe batch environment plays a major role in delivering mission-critical business processes and will continue to do so well into the future. But like any complex system, as time proceeds and changes occur, periodic assessment and updates are needed to ensure continued agility and cost-effectiveness. The experts at SEA are experienced in assessing batch environments of all sizes and complexities. We can help you to assess your current environment and develop the specific metrics that will help you achieve and sustain a cost-effective and agile batch z/os environment. About SEA: Established in 1982 Software Engineering of America has built a worldwide reputation as a leading provider of infrastructure optimization and automation solutions. With products licensed at over 10,000 data centers worldwide SEA s customers include 9 of the fortune 10 and over 90% of the fortune 500. SEA is the leading provider of software solutions and expertise in the z/os batch marketplace with over 30 years of experience helping the world s largest companies improve efficiency, lower costs and incorporate best practices into managing their batch environment. Learn more at www.seasoft.com 6