IPP Assignment - Narration of Summer 2015 Internship at UPS

1. Activity Description

June 2nd, the first day at work in UPS (United Parcel Service). The 77 interns hired by UPS for the 2015 Summer Internship were divided into batches of two, the first batch had the orientation the previous day while I was in the second batch. The orientation was supposed to be an entire day affair right from 8am to 5pm. As I arrived at the destination, it was a huge long and wide brown colored 4-storied building. Always I pictured UPS as a package delivery company, looking at such a huge building was surprising; UPS has more to it than just package delivery. All the interns were present well before time for the orientation to start, who would want to get late on the first day, right?

The orientation started with the HR head welcoming and assuring this to be a great summer experience. The main task in this orientation for them was to get all the interns processed i.e. to get all the information of every intern into their system, creating a profile, signing the agreement, reviewing of official-legal documents, getting a picture clicked for the identification card, and so on. The interns were called one by one and each intern took about 15 odd minutes for the entire process. Meanwhile, various employees proudly called as “UPSers” from various departments presented things about their department and how they are glad that some of us would be assisting them in their work. Apart from these activities, we also had few fun activities lined up throughout the orientation session as a get-to-know-each-other exercise and team-building exercise. We were also given many UPS merchandised goodies and at the end we had a photograph taken of the complete batch. It was FUN!

The Second day started by reporting to my hiring manager followed by introduction to the members of the team ‘Mainframe DB2 Systems Programming’ where I will be interning for the next three months. Every day for few hours I used to get knowledge transfer from different members of the team especially from my peer advisor or otherwise called as mentor. Every intern was assigned one peer advisor who was responsible for assigning work, teaching and explaining what work is to be done, etc. Initially I was not given any projects to work on, because the focus for them was to get me familiar with the mainframe system. I spent most of my time learning and exploring the different features of the mainframe system and the DB2 database, went through different books given to me by my teammates in order to get to know the system that I will be working on. Once that was done, it was time for me to get working on different projects that my manger had chalked out for the summer intern duration.

1.1 Projects worked on:

1) Health checks jobs (change records) for Ramapo Ridge production systems.

2) Moving bug fixes into production and monitoring its correctness.

3) Package rebind reports for all the DB2 z/OS systems.

4) Setting up package rebind jobs for Sandbox systems.

5) Cleanup of old BMC and CA objects on Sandbox systems.

1.2 Project Objectives:

1) Health check jobs (change records) for Ramapo Ridge production systems.

Currently all the jobs in the Ramapo Ridge production system are recognized and have been named using account codes; account codes are nothing but six digit unique numbers but due to the limitation on the number of account codes, the names of these jobs were required to be changed, replacing these account codes with meaningful names that would simplify remembering the jobs.

It is always easy and feasible to recognize a job by some meaningful name rather than by any number, but most importantly to follow the standards set by IBM. My work was to set up different jobs for different subsystems in the Ramapo that would run in a batch and update the job names. After setting up the jobs, I had to follow a six-step approach in order to set these jobs into production. This entire process involved interaction and involvement of two other teams mainly the DBA DB2 team and the SPM team. This project is still in progress and it’s a yearlong process even though if one manages to get two subsystems renamed in a week to the maximum.

2) Moving bug fixes into production and monitoring its correctness.

Having completed the first phase out of the two of upgrading the DB2 system from v10 to v11 in March 2015, the team encountered several bugs, which were not severe, but it was necessary to get them fixed before the final phase of the upgrade. My work was to write JCLs with fixes in them, set them up to run in the production and then monitor the appropriate jobs to check if the fixes were properly made. Since I was working on the production environment, it was necessary that care was taken and the peer advisor reviewed my JCLs, because making changes to the production data was delicate.

3) Package rebind reports for all the DB2 z/OS systems.

The package rebind reports are nothing but reports that contain data regarding the different DB2 z/OS systems such as production, development, test, stress and mvs environments. This data provides information regarding the amount of collection ids and packages inside those collection ids that are present in the different production systems. This information is very much needed in order to analyze which collection ids and packages are being used, how often they are used, their criticality, which ones are not

used and so on. This is not a requirement of IBM but it requires us to extract this data that will help us analyze and provide a detailed report to them.

I was assigned to run these jobs once a week on Monday and extract the data from the mainframe systems to the spreadsheet. Then, analyze the data and generate a detailed report with a specific format provided by the IBM to my manager which was after review eventually sent to IBM for their reference.

4) Setting up package rebind jobs for Sandbox systems.

As mentioned in the above point what a package rebind report is and how it is used for the different DB2 z/OS systems, one task for me was to set up similar kind of jobs for the sandbox systems. Firstly, a sandbox system is a replica of the production systems just that it is not an actual production environment. UPS has seven such sandbox systems, specially used by other teams like the DB2 DBA team for testing purpose. Though it is used only as a testing environment it has to be on equal configuration as the other production and development systems.

My work was to set up similar jobs in the Sandbox systems that were set up in the other DB2 z/OS systems, though the details of the JCLs were completely different based on the system, I had to set it up for all the six sandbox systems except one of the sandbox as it was still on v10 DB2. Post setting up the jobs, I ran them once a week on Tuesdays, since we didn’t want to mix up the reports of the DB2 z/OS systems with these sandbox systems hence they were being execute on two different days.

5) Cleanup of old BMC and CA objects on Sandbox systems.

One of the important projects was to get rid of the space occupied by unwanted and unused data in the mainframe system, and though it sounds like just a normal clean up, but the amount of space held by data specially which is unused is considerable and since we are going to move into the final phase of the v11 DB2 upgrade, it was necessary to make some space for future data.

The above package rebind reports helped in a way, we were able to identify the amount of data i.e. collection ids and packages that are available in all the DB2 systems including sandbox systems and we could make out which ones were not being used and which ones have not yet been even used, using this data we could get rid of such data. I was assigned to set up jobs that would read the spreadsheet through the mainframe system and then based on that data and some criteria using SQL, it would go on to free up the packages and collection ids. I started doing this for the sandbox systems, because even if some package gets deleted that’s being used indirectly we could always restore them until I got used to it and was able to find out the exact ones, and after a month I was made to do the similar clean ups on the production systems.

1.2 Projects in Future:

Apart from the above projects, some of which have completed while the others are still a work in progress, but another project, which is lined up for the last few weeks, is to develop an application using HTML and JAVA. So there is no such application right now with the UPS production team that will assist them or give an easy access to the current status and also the health status of the DB2 z/OS systems. So I design a desktop application that will help them in just looking at the application and not actually going inside the mainframe system and querying and doing all other things just to know what the status is which is time consuming.

This application will have a front end that will list down all the DB2 systems and an indicator against each of them giving a red or green or yellow signal similar to the traffic signals. So the back end will do all the process of fetching and querying and doing all the tasks that one would usually do to know the status, and this would be working continuously, hence the production team as well as my team will be able to just monitor the changes and if at all there is any issue, proper and quick actions can be taken without losing time.

P.S. the prototype cannot be shared as per company rules.

1.3 Problems Encountered and it’s Solution:

There were a number of problems encountered at the early stages of the internship period, because I was still trying to get used to, to the mainframe system. Though I had previously worked on it but it was a long time ago, so making mistakes, I would say those mistakes were made because of not knowing what actually to do.

For example, while setting jobs for the change records i.e. the Ramapo health check jobs, it was difficult to make out if there was any inter dependency of jobs, say if A job was to be changed, but it’s being used by some other job in it, then it was necessary to rename the A job in that calling job as well. So this was a tough task to make out, as there were n-number of calling-called jobs interdependency.

Apart from these, there were few others, little minute things which can result in the jobs failing or not compiling at all at the first place. I always tried to find out solutions to it but there were times where it was not possible to find out what went wrong, that’s when I took help from my teammates. Moreover, my teammates never gave me a complete solution of anything, they always gave me a hint, and based on which I was able to figure out what mistake I had done or what I had missed that resulted in the mistake to happen.

2. Analysis Section

2.1 Things Learnt from the experience:

1) UPS is full of acronyms. Right from the name of the company to every tiny detail be it at the technical or the managerial level, most things are abbreviated. So it was really tough at the start to get used to all these acronyms that fellow employees used, but then slowly got used to it, because that’s how UPS works, on acronyms.

2) Using the Mainframe system, what people popularly call it as the blank screen with green font. In order to work on mainframes, it is but obvious that I had to learn the complete system, though there is so much in it to learn, a three month period is very less, but I learnt how to use the TSO(Time Sharing System), ISPF(Interactive System Productivity Facility), SDSF(System Display and Search Facility), SPUFI(SQL Processing Using File Input), the Catalog Manager, the Change Manager, the Detector, and so on. These features are so strong and so powerful which makes the mainframe system strong and still cannot be replaced with any other platform for that matter. The UPS vendors such as IBM, CA Applications and BMC provide all these features. All these being the base of the mainframe systems, on which we generally worked for 80% of the time, it was very important that I got familiar with the working and functioning of all these features.

3) Being part of the Mainframe DB2 Systems Programming team, it was necessary to understand and learn what and how the DB2 structure was i.e. what is a Sysplex, what a LPAR is, what a Subsystem is and how they are interconnected, how do they work, how many LPARs, how many Subsystems are there and so on. How many DB2 subsystems are in v10 and how many are in v11, since the entire upgrade had not yet taken place.

4) The package rebind reports required me to set up a new database, different tables, indexes, etc plus it required me to write complex queries which I could never write in my academics or else where before. I was able to implement and understand the concept of SQL in depth.

5) The package rebind reports also required me to export data from mainframes to the spreadsheet. Pivot tables, a very powerful tool if you are working on spreadsheets, it is more like the SQL on a database, but this is on the spreadsheet. The concept of pivot tables helps us to manipulate data from the tables the way you want it but on a spreadsheet. Somewhat similar to SQL, this helped me to organize data on the spreadsheet the way the team wanted in order to analyze data. I was able to work on it and helped me to come up with solutions.

6) Why package rebinds are required and how it is done.7) Another major task that is part of the DB2 Systems programming team is the DB2

maintenance, which is nothing but upgrading from old to new version of DB2. A very complex and rigorous process requires a lot of steps to be followed right from setting up jobs that checks the status of the each DB2 system before the maintenance and similar kind of jobs to be run after the maintenance to check if everything was and is working fine, because if anything goes wrong on the these databases, entire UPS can

come to a standstill. A number of things to learn from it was the SMP/Es, the PTFs, receive-apply-accept, when to reject a fix and when to restore.

8) Another important aspect to learn was what are the different data transfer methods or techniques such as FTP or TRANSMIT. This is important because this has to be used more than often.

9) Apart from these technical aspects mentioned above, there were many other things learned over the period. But there were few other aspects that I was able to learn is how the US work culture is, what team work is, working in a team is not that simple and not hard but its required because that’s how companies run. Also, meeting deadlines is a very important and critical thing, how to interact and increase your network, and so on.

2.2 How this will help in my class and future?

Though Mainframes or anything related to it such as what a JCL is what a DB2 is are not part of my academics, because Mainframes is not that familiar and popular in today’s high tech world, but the knowledge gained in SQL would surely help me further in my classes where use of database is required, everything requires the use of database and the knowledge gained here in SQL would surely be of great help.

Moreover, how to achieve deadline, how to work on the task assigned to you when it doesn’t work or the client or manager wants it in a different way then how would I manage would be of great help and I would be able to achieve this experience in achieving deadline of my class assignments and do things prior to the deadline and be on time, plus if there is any kind of change introduced, I should be able to accommodate it with ease.

Apart from this, the knowledge and experience gained during this internship will definitely help me find a job and pursue my career in the Mainframes, because having worked before as well as now, I am sure that this is what I would like to continue to pursue because Mainframes interests me.

2.3 Fun activities organized by UPS:

The 2015 summer internship at UPS not only involved work and projects and learning, but it also involved various fun activities arranged by the HR team. Right from the Mixer Event (party organized at an Irish pub for all the interns and higher management including the Vice President), the Baseball Game (event for all the interns, their managers and the higher management to watch the baseball game between Rockland Boulders and Japanese Stars), the Hub Tour (an evening for all the interns to visit the UPS hub facility) to the BRG Millenniums Golf Event (the miniature golf event held for all the interns to come together and have fun), all these events not just allowed us to gel with other interns but also an opportunity to interact with the higher management, how many companies give such a chance specially for interns? For all such and making the intern experience really smooth, it was great working at UPS!

Appendix

2015 Summer Interns Batch 2:

Activities during the orientation session:

1) Know Your Interns activity

2) Build the tallest tower using Marshmallows activity

3) Golf event

*The source of all the images is from the UPS website.