Ideal Users to IT staff ratio

[dennisbbb]

A friend is asking "how big of a company (users) and IT department is best to work for?".

I cannot answer him statistically so I told him the best company/IT dept size ratio is maybe 80 users/IT staff.

I think too less of users per IT staff will make the job boring.

What do you think is ideal ratio?

 

[mrdenny]

It depends on the company and what position he's doing.

If he's going to be help desk then the question should be users to help desk ratio. If he's a DBA it doesn't really matter as DBAs don't interact with the users in the company 99% of the time.

What position is he looking for?

My current company has ~16 people in IT (7 help desk, 3 sa, 2 net eng, 4 dba) for a site of about 800 users (just for our site). Here we have over 300 servers.

A prevous job had 7 people in IT (1 help desk, 1 web support, 1 dba, 4 sa/net eng) for a 150 person company. Here we had over 150 servers.

It pretty much all depends. There is no hard and fast rule.

Denny
MCSA (2003) / MCDBA (SQL 2000)

--Anything is possible. All it takes is a little research. (Me)

http://www.mrdenny.com

(Not quite so old any more.)

 

[dennisbbb]

This is a jack-of-all-trades Tech Support position.

Wow that's a lot of servers for the relatively small number of users. 300 servers for 800 users?

That's about right on your company's ratio, 7+3 to support 800 users.

I want to know what others think is a good ratio as far as technical support (user help) goes.

 

[alexhu]

for a 150 person company. Here we had over 150 servers.

Were you making servers ?

Alex

 

[Dollie]

I think I'm lucky to have an ideal ratio. I'm the "jack of all trades" IT person here. We have 2 web developers, but they tend to stay behind their computers, tone deaf to my voice. I have 25 in-house users, 4 mobile users and 5 servers to babysit.

Without more education (I start college next week), I'll be struggling if my user base goes over 50. Hopefully by the time we grow to that size, I'll be ready and able to handle them.

 

[Grenage]

At the moment myself and one other maintain around 50 workstations, 20 on-the-road users and 6 servers. Both of us have slightly different fields so it works well. Now that we've taken over a couple of small companies and are networking together I imagine we will need one more.

I guess the ideal ratio depends a lot on how demanding the users are and what sort of work people are doing.


Carlsberg don't run I.T departments, but if they did they'd probably be more fun.

 

[tommishuck]

currently it is 2 at my place. We have 16 sites over a 50 mile radius. I do all the running while he stays in the office and manages the main servers and satifies the higher ups with fancy documents.

 

[Spirit]

There's me and the IT Director - who directs stuff I guess - but "we" support about 180 people spread across 5 sites in Europe and the US.... At my old job I used to support 120 users across 2 sites (both in the UK) and that was the same as this job IT, NW & App support, development, DB, SQL, purchasing, licensing, documenting, spec'ing etc.

At least I am never bored!

Iain