Persistence and Networking Pays Off For Control-M Newbie.

In March 2012 I was brought in as an intern at my company to shadow the ways of IT and also be a part time Control-m scheduler. As soon I started in the IT arena I knew that I was going go be constantly drinking knowledge from a fire hose. To help me handle this I began by something I do well which is networking! The first thing I did was created this blog and started posting things that I came across. I guess you could call this blog a journal of my Control-m progress. This led to a good amount of hits and also some comments from other Control-m experts. Another thing I did was I began building all kinds of jobs in our Control-m development environment. This served as good practice and helped me really dive in and learn certain functions of Control-m. I also did a lot of googlling related to anything on Control-m I could find. I did find things but a lot of the stuff I found didn’t apply to my environment or were subjects well beyond my skillset. It was very frustrating because Control-m is such a small specialty it’s hard to find a lot of good information online. Eventually I stumbled upon a site that was run by Control-m subject matter expert that dedicated to his time with Control-m. I actually reached out to the Control-m expert by emailing the contact information on his site, just to start up some Control-m conversation. Well it turned out he loves helping folks in the Control-m community. This led to a lot of resourceful emails and phone calls. Eventually I was able to get this guy on to do some Control-m training and other types of work for my IT shop. From our constant Control-m dealings I now consider this guy and friend and Control-m colleague. I also developed a relationship with one of BMC’s control-m experts and salesmen. He was always good to check on me and answer all my questions. And he even advised my manager at the time to upgrade our Control-m environment from version 7 to version 8. His recommendation was approved and then next thing you know, I was tasked to do the migration. Around this time I also began to work with BMC Support with a lot of issues I ran across. This was also a good resource for me in certain situations. Another thing that came along in Feb. 2013 BMC Software invited me to one of their annual Control-m Briefing conferences in Houston. Going into this I thought this would be just a boring quick turn around trip. I was wrong about that. It turned out to be a good time and led me to more Control-m knowledge and even more subject matter experts that I was able to network with. In fact one of the contacts I met I still reach out today for any Control-m questions and sometimes shoot him a text to see how he is doing. He happens to be a really talented Control-m Administrator and scheduler. In fact he was pretty much born to be a Control-m expert because his mother is a career Control-m scheduler as well. I just think that is really neat side note. Another thing that I did to increase my networking opportunities was created a Linkedin account. This has served as a very useful tool and has put me in contact with a lot of good IT connections and other folks in business as well.

By building up a strong network of Control-m colleagues and constantly building things in developmentI catapulted me from being an intern in March 2012 to owning Control-m at my shop by December of 2012. It doesn’t hurt to network and be persistent no matter what you’re trying to accomplish.