On a super pushed project to clone lots of CICS regions and migrate RACF 
security profiles between them I had developed some useful scripts to clone 
entire RACF classes of profiles.  You could simply copy and entire class to 
another, replacing everything in the target class, or in the reverse direction. 
 Got a call from Ops around 6am on a Saturday morning when CICS wasn't coming 
up from the overnight shutdown for the batch window (pre-24x7 everything up 
days).  I'd been working late on Friday night to meet some project deadlines, 
and immediately realised what I had done - cloned a resource class in the wrong 
direction, deleting all the production system security definitions in the 
process.

Was in the office 30 minutes later and we had everything working again before 
8am (mainly due to those super useful cloning scripts and a saved database of 
security definitions).  Fortunately the online banking systems were not needing 
to be up during the weekend back in these days, so no customer impact, only a 
few staff doing weekend work might have noticed the regions were not available 
at the scheduled time.

Lesson learned?  Apart from the issues of time pressure and pushing for 
extended hours of work to meet deadlines...  The Project Manager in charge of 
the entire migration (my work was just a small part of his puzzle) sat all the 
techies down by around 9am that morning and explained to us that no-one was 
going to get in trouble for this, and that the buck stopped with him, being the 
PM and the driver of the aggressive timeline and project priorities.  It was 
inevitable that sometimes things might go wrong, and the most important thing 
was how we dealt with it rather than the fact that it happened.  I learned a 
lot that morning about what distinguishes quality project management from 
wannabes.

Cheers - Mike

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