>a few consultants? 84,500 hrs = 42 person-yrs Ohio interviewed me back in late 2008 for a role on this project. So they have been working on it for nearly 4 years. So an average team size of 11 or 12. Given that they did it with mostly State Staff, they would have had a steep learning curve going from green screen editors to Visual Studio 2008 and whatever RDBMS tools were appropriate. So they did pretty well IMO.
I actually think it is a smart strategy to do such projects mostly in-house, augmented only somewhat with contract experts to tackle the problems as they arise. Now that it is done, the in-house staff will have a sense of accomplishment and will "own" the result. When such projects are outsourced to consultants, there is always resentment among the in-house staff that get the result "dumped" on them to support. Ohio has avoided this problem. Also, since this was a COBOL/PACBASE to COBOL migration, the "tribal knowledge" of the old main framers is not lost. The challenge now is to pass this knowledge onto the new generation before the old guys are gone. Lastly, by going with the Fujitsu Tools they have opened a door for future growth. Unlike the more commonly used Micro Focus NetExpress tools, the Fujitsu NetCOBOL compiler is a fully CLR compliant language. So it now becomes easy to revise and extend the applications using VB.Net and/or C#. Until very recently, the competing Micro Focus Enterprise Server environment was a dead-end to itself, extensible only with difficulty using the C language. I understand that Micro Focus has been working hard to address this deficiency. John ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
