CICS and WMQ - The Resurrection of Useful

We have discovered that the mainframe is strategic again.  We want to use our CICS transactions as services and have them initiated by WMQ, because we don't want to write a queuing mechanism,  What can we really expect when no one has touched these programs for years?  And no one knows the source.  We have to guarantee sub-second response time, but everything is going to a black box known as MQ.  How do we measure our performance?  What MQ verbs should be used and avoided?

Tracks: CICS Systems Programming, Middleware and Software Architecture