IT Staff

[theworm91]

I need some help from all of you. Could you please share with me the number of employees in your staff, for your IT department. I want to get the number of users that each position can support.
Please consider we have about 100 computer users. We are a large construction company. So there is drafting, accounting, etc. I want to get a feel for how many IT peole you have in each department. IE do you have 2 admins, 1 webmaster, 1 support. Thanks for any help you can provide.

 

[eyeswideclosed]

The question assumes all IT people are equally proficient, which is definitely not the case. 1 good person can do more work than 10 deadbeats.

 

[Martin999]

ok, about 10000 users, 2000+ servers, and 30ish admins

M

 

[Kactus]

EyesWideClosed makes a good point about the relative skill levels of various staff members.

Another thing to consider is what they'll be doing - some tasks are much more time/labour intensive. Eg, running a Service Desk for people who are spoon-fed IT sucks manpower like you wouldn't believe!

I remember reading somewhere once that Lotus recommends one Notes admin for 50 users. Massive overkill, in my opinion; there just isn't that much administration to do in Notes!

Other than that I haven't seen anything that stipulates a recommended staffing ratio.

I would suggest for 100 people you would only need a couple of good generalists for supporting desktops and and MS servers(don't forget your draughtsmen and accountants are supposed to be the experts in their packages). If you're going to do something interesting like set up a website then you should think about hiring a web developer on a project basis and a full time person to support the site. If the website is going to be an ongoing, bigger than Ben Hurr thing just hire a developer.

For the record we have two IT people for 120 desktops and six servers. Both pretty highly skilled.

 

[Andreh]

It also depends if you plan to outsource some of the tasks that you need to get done. Working for a consultancy company, I see some business have internal skills up to a certain level and outsource some tasks / issues to the people who do it all the time. And when times are very busy, they have some help / support available. Another thing being hiring people with required skill sets can be very expensive and specialised which can be a bit out of reach financially speaking. It boils down to you budget i guess as you get what you pay for.

This may or may not be something you do / are aware of or interested in.




"Assumption is the mother of all f#%kups!

 

[Gooser]

We have 1 unix/linux guy for 2 servers and 3 windows guys for 327 servers--Wait, no we don't.

This is like asking in an auto mechanic's forum, "how many wrenches do you have per mechanic?" There's no straight correlation.

Depends on...
...what kind of work you do
...what kind of load you have
...what kind of peak load you have
...what kind of sustained load you have
...how visible are you to attackers
...what software you run
...what hardware you run
...how your stuff is supported by your vendors
...what kind of quality your code has
...how reliable is your source of power
...(x) kind of you [have,do,are,need,use,run,...]

This question is nearly invalid. Though, it does call to mind some of the things you should think about when sizing your staff.




v/r

Gooser

Why do today
that which may not need to be done tomorrow --me

 

[n2nuk]

I was told about a report concerning staffing levels for IT departments, it was one of Gartner or Butler papers that Computer Weekly or Computing go on about. I never managed to read it fully but the thinking was that end user support is calculated by the numbers of 'clusters' within your organisation.

A cluster is defined as a group of users using a certain operating system or pc hardware or bespoke DB application.

This way you do not to worry about users spread over different sites or on different floors. Although you can have a cluster that is just called for 'Network' for all your communication systems.

We counted the number of clusters we supported and calculated the numbers of calls that each cluster was responsible for along with the average amount of time per call.
This allowed us to cost each support call and highlighted where additional resource was required.

My manager calcuated that we needed an extra 2 full time technicians. My problem is that I am a realist whilst my manager is an empire builder, I was not convinced that we needed 2 full time users as I did not feel we had the workload to support it.

Anyway we now 3 full-time techies supporting around 200 users, the majority of the calls are MS Office or WIndows lockouts!

Hope this helps