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Phillips Petroleum has a credit card division. The division has 120 programmers. Management in 1996 decided to make the division compliant. It took six programmers of the 120 and put them on the conversion job part-time. They are not finished yet.
Six out of 120: 5% of the team. Management put them on the job part-time. What does this tell us about management's commitment to solving y2k?
This is from PC WEEK (June 1).
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Over the years, the IT group -- which supports more than 120 employees in the oil giant's customer credit card division -- created several mainframe-based legacy systems for applications such as accounts receivable and electronic funds transfer. . . .
Phillips formed a committee dedicated to solving the millennium bug in April 1996 and initiated a companywide conversion project. It was decided that the credit card division, with its many proprietary systems written years ago using Assembler and COBOL and still running on an IBM DOS VSE mainframe, should take the lead in doing most of its own conversion. . . .
Staff dedicated to Y2K: Six programmers working on a part-time basis. . . .
Programmers on the Y2K effort also needed to continue with their usual workload, fitting in Y2K tasks when time permitted. For that reason, the tools had to be easy to use and training was kept to a minimum. Getting the most work done during the shortest amount of time was key.
Lines of code to be translated: 900,000
Deadline for completion: December 1998
The 900,000 lines of code had to be completed by the staff of six programmers on a part-time basis.
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