Modernising legacy technology in New Mexico

The Client

The State of New Mexico Human Services Department provides services to more than 800,000 State residents.  Jumar worked with the department to enable it to upgrade its CA Gen application system (and supporting environments), which is used by the State to manage various child support functions.

The Challenge

SoNM-HSD has made a significant investment in CA Gen technology and skills for more than fifteen years – and it is core to the State’s Child Support Enforcement System (CSES).

CSES, implemented in 1998, is hosted on a mainframe and is classed as a ‘legacy application’.  The vast majority of this environment is created and maintained with CA Gen, and its scale is considerable.  The CA Gen application contains nearly 800 procedure steps, 2,400 action diagrams, and more than 300 external action blocks.

Due to this high dependence on CA Gen, SoNM-HSD needed to ensure this critical technology was future-proofed and deployed to a fully supported platform.  It was therefore necessary to perform a significant version upgrade project to move to a more current version of CA Gen to secure the future support for the business critical application. The department was concerned that the risk of unsupported code in the environment was increasing, and recognised the need to mitigate this risk via a predictable, reliable and seamless transition to a later supported version of CA Gen.

SoNM-HSD engaged TXP as a recognised CA Gen specialist to support a comprehensive upgrade project – including an in-depth assessment of the existing environment, a model corruption clean-up exercise, standardisation of the various supporting environments, skills transfer / coaching and consultancy advice across the upgrade program of work (leveraging Jumar’s broader skills in mainframe, DB2 and CICS technologies).

The upgrade (from CA Gen version 6.5 to 8.0) was completed to budget and within the agreed duration.  SoNM now has a fully supported version of CA Gen, with which it can confidently continue to develop and maintain functionality to provide vital child support services to hundreds of thousands of State residents.

The Solution

CA Gen Upgrade with additional consultancy

• Project completed to budget and within agreed duration
• Client now has fully supported version of CA Gen
• Upgrade (v6.5 to v8.0) passes through v7.6 – generally accepted to be a major step
• Facilitated by automation tooling
• Client benefited from skills transfer
• Additional consultancy provided thanks to TXP’s expertise

The Benefits

At the end of the upgrade execution phase, basic technical verification testing was performed by TXP to ensure that the application was generated and deployed correctly, ahead of the SoNM-HSD QA and test phases.

The deployment process was led by SoNM-HSD, but with constant close-working with TXP consultants to help address ad-hoc technical issues that resulted from the deployment of the upgrade to test and production environments.  At a critical stage very late in the project lifecycle TXP’s knowledge of mainframe technology proved extremely beneficial, as they provided a high degree of flexibility to support SoNM-HSD to help resolve “out-of-scope” mainframe environment issues relating to SoNM usage of CICS and DB2 technologies.

At TXP, the concept of ‘project closure’ is much more than just ‘handing over the keys’ to the upgraded system. It is a chance to ensure all objectives were met satisfactorily, and to learn any lessons resulting from the project.  In this case, the issue of team working was particularly valued – as was the joint level of planning, communication and production of supporting documentation.  Most importantly, however, the primary objective of the project was achieved – to budget, and in the overall timescale specified.  TXP was able to add value along the way with its proven methodologies, solutions and apply additional consultancy expertise as and when required.