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IT Worker-to-User Ratio Survey?
Breid asks: "This year has definitely been a career nightmare for IT pros. Our own company has seen our staff trimmed to near nothing and frankly, the workload is beginning to stretch people to the breaking point. With performance reviews coming up I want to make some statements to upper management concerning personnel and compensation. You can find plenty of salary surveys, but I haven't seen statements regarding the size of staff involved. And IMHO, workers on a 5 person staff supporting 200 need some compensation adjustment vs a 20 person staff supporting the same user base.
At this point (for all of you still employed), what's the IT worker to workstation ratio look like? Or is anyone aware of any statistical data compiled about this?"
1 dba, 2 admins... 200+ servers, 2 DS3 lines, 8 T1's, 120 people local 1100 people worldwide.
They wonder if they can cut one of the admins cause it is slow around x-mas....go figure.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
Last job - 2 years ago: 2 to 50
Last job - 1 year ago: 1 to 30
Last job - 6 months ago: 1 to 5
New job - now: 3 to 100
New job - soon: 2 to 100
Shiznit. When I worked at BMC Software in the IT department, the ration was 1 IT employee for every *100* users. Compensation? I started out (in 1996) at $38K + benefits. When I left the IT department (in 2000) I was making $49,700.
I got the occasional bonus ($50 Travelers Cheque or something like that) and the occasional free T-shirt.
None of this was worth working for the flaming hemmoroid I had as a boss, which is why I left.
IS our ratio. THat suddenly sounds low. First-2nd level support onyly thoug, no account setup or network issues, thats another team.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
1999 Advertising/PR/design/new media (purty websites and flash):
IT dept. of 4 people for 120 employees.
2000 New media/games development:
IT dept. of 3 people for 100 employees.
2001-2002 ColdFusion development/Python software:
IT dept. of 2-3 people for 30 employees.
Joe Grossberg
http://josephgrossberg.blogspot.com
Joe
http://www.joegrossberg.com
A quick overview for my company is as follows:
2001: 4 admins, 1 admin/manager, 500 workstations/servers
2002: 1 admin, 1 admin/manager, 150 workstations/servers
Now: 0 admin, 1 admin/manager, 200 workstations/servers
2003: 0 admin, 0 admin/manager, 200 workstations/servers
Guess what...
PS: The last two weren't fired. They stood up and left!
StarTrek.org Free Webmail
Raw numbers are hard to compare;
other factors can cause the need for more people include:
1) really old machines
2) complex and/or special user software
3) bleading edge tech
4) really slow users
5) etc
these factors should be included in any stats
I heard one IT employee to 20 "regular" employees was the standard. I don't remember where that number came from though. I do remember that being that ratio applying to only helpdesk staff, and it seems a little high today.
burn um out
hire a new one at a lower cost
burn um out
hire a new one at a lower cost
I looked into doing this a few years ago, when staffing where I used to be got low. There is a reason that its hard to find this info - it varies (ALOT) by situation. I know Gartner has come out with some numbers, but you have to question thier validity.
It all depends on the situation and circumstances you are in - depends if you are working in high-tech (ie intelligent users, power users), or at a financial firm. It depends on the overall commitment to IT your company has - do you have predominatley new equipment, or is it mostly old crap that is patched together with duct tape and bubblegum. Do you have strong management, or are you constantly having to re-work issues due to poor planning? Are the admins any good, or is one or two of them constanly covering for the other screw-ups on the team? Etc....etc...etc...
Each situation is completely different. Bottom line is, if you are competant, and are overworked, your ratio is too low. The problem is how to get management to see that - I eneded up leaving my last situation because of this exact issue, and management refused to correct the situation.
Regardless, good luck!
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." - Thomas Jefferson
We're fortunate in the fact that the owners recognize the importance of a responsive IT department. I'm the network admin, and there's an end-user training/support person. I think they'd have hired another, but about 1/3 of the users are CAD (power) users, so we barely hear from them.
About 70 supporting ~4000 users, 6000 machines and a huge amount of mainframe, midrange and storage kit.
The main guy got fired, so we're left with his trainee. Things are going steady but very slow. Don't ask him about stress.
Local:
1 admin, 43 workers, 80 machines
Global:
8 admins, 245 workers, 300 machines
It all depends on what your company does and how they do it. Do you work at an ISP or a bank or restaurant? Does your IT department provide PC support or do you develop your own applications in house as well? How big is your company, employee wise and revenue wise? How dependent is your company on IT?
What I've seen in small to mid-sized companies is that properly run IT departments typically have one or two admins per 50 users up to around 150 users. After 150 users it's one admin per 100 or 150 users. The IT head count may be slightly higher at companies that are very reliant on IT or have round the clock operations.
Now, if the company does in house development, then that's a whole other story. It all depends on what your business is and how much development there is. I've seen development depertments that were 50% of the company even though IT was not their core business. I've also seen 2000 user companies with 2 developers.
1 Admin/Manager, 2 Admins, 1 DBA, 2 techs ($9/hr techs)
3000 users, all on thin client
50 servers
200 control workstations, in an industrial setting
We are running a pretty tight ship here. Admin-wise, everyone is happy and well-compensated. We usually lose a tech every 18 months. Occasionally during busy periods, we hire 2-3 techs to help cover the overnight factory shifts.
The key is eliminating PCs. No PCs == less surfing, no extra software installs, etc.
Laptops are the only exception, and even then they are generally supported by the user community. People pick their laptops... bigshots can spend $1500-2500 every 18 mos and regular employees get hand-me-downs or buy a 600-1500 machine.
Fortune 500 Development Department
PC Support: 2 Admins, 300 Employees.
UNIX Support: 3 Full-Time, 2 Contractors, 250ish Boxes. Mostly development and production look-a-like testing environments.
<Amanda`> I just went out to the parking lot in my bathrobe to exchange warez CDs.
I dont know exactly what you or your company does, so maybe you guys need more support than the average company, but it does not appear that you guys should be stretched 'to the breaking point.' You guys should be MAKING time to make your processes more efficient, and clamping down the machines a bit tighter so that users can not screw them up so often. Also, do not be afraid to say no to fixing a pesky problem if there are larger issues at hand ( like spending time automating things). If you guys are spending your whole day putting out fires, then there is a larger problem. I also dont know what the culture or general intelligence is like at your company, but if it is anything like the places where I have worked where all the training is to be paid for by money out of my pocket and on my own out of work time, then propogate that attitude down to the users. Make them figure out how to install the printer drivers, or fix a paper jam, or put up a sign sign explaining what 'PC Load Letter' means next to the fax machine. I am sure someone knows how to do these things, and they can use the 'ask a neighbor' system to take care of these tedious things.
What the hell is wrong with you people. The view you are propogating here, is the one that gets all IT departments in trouble to begin with. Your saying that an IT person, is an IT person, is an IT person. There are admins, coders, support, training, etc. There are every kind of IT person under the rainbow, and each one has a distinct role. IT people != capital. You can not just throw more IT at a problem and it will work, or take them away when you are overbudget. You need the right kind of IT person for each job. Personally I think the problem with jobs today, is that they are unwilling to designate a person as a certain kind of IT person, so they just get clumped into the IT person category, and thusly when people look at the budget they realize they have 5 general purpose IT people. Time for cutbacks. Who the hell came up with this inane grouping anyways. Developers should be working under the other departments making programs that work with the other departments programs anyways.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
I work in a CS deparment at a large .edu so things maybe weird. Basicly we support everything from the router down to software. there's 5 full time admins and a person that comes into change tapes and do odd things like update inventory. We support solaris(6-9), linux(any distro), tru64, irix, windows(95,98,NT,2k,XP). We've got ~30 servers and 300 desktops. along with ~20 switchs, and 2 routers. However we're not that over worked. We use stuff like CFengine to manage and patch the systems and some home brew stuff to other things. It's all about automation.
2 System admins, 1 DBA/Report writer. 500+ users in 19 locations via Dial-up, Frame Relay, and VPN.
---------
AlmostFreeLinux.com
I'm guessing from the "compensation adjustment" comment that what you actually want is not a bunch of statistical data, but rather, getting paid more for what you're doing...
One good way to do that is to get a job offer with a better salary (I know, easier said than done). If you want to keep your current job you will have great leverage to ask for more money. If you want to leave, you've got that sweet offer in hand! Win-win.
2 (and a bit) admins, 1 programmer
12 servers, 250 users spread across Europe, US and Japan
7:300 - and we do all our own development (which can be a blessing, really)
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
There's 5 IT guys, supporting 4 different offices and 130ish people. 5 Citrix boxes, 2 Novell servers, and some W2K voicemail servers.
I work for a corporation with about 48,000 employees in the U.S. I'm at their R&D Facility, which has about 525 people in our building. There's 15 of us in the IT group. That includes desktop support, web development, network design/engineering, and includes one manager, one supervisor, and one secret^H^H^H administrative assistant.
Working on a soon to be released opensource project.
:)
1 admin
1 programmer
1 support guy
1 boss
1 customer
They just happen to be all me.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
In my experience
2 Support staff / 50 users = Happy productive users, proactive support, bliss. Environment stays ahead of the upgrade curve. Support staff has time to understand current business practices and provide value-added enhancements.
1 Support staff / 50 users = Users OK, support staff fights fires big and small at a good pace. Environment stays fairly static, but current enough.
1 support staff / 100 users = users angry, less productive, small fires get ignored. Training and proactive support is only a dream.
With that said, 5 people for 200 users is 1 support staff per 40 users. That's not so bad! Are these people all doing the same job? Are the 200 divided among different departments? If so maybe you can each take your own 40 or so users in 1 or 2 departments as "Primary" and the other 160 as secondary. If you can divide them by business function and develop closer relationships by each concentrating on 40 people, your job will likely get easier. At least it will get more rewarding as the same 40 people come to rely on you and respect you more and more. Not only that, but you get to know your users better and decide which users to teach instead of just fix every time. This works great if you have good people. In the past I have more than doubled my "free" time by including 5 minutes of training with every support call. After a while they mostly fixed the small problems themselves. Three cheers for empowered users!
If it makes you feel better, I know 2 guys who are the sole support for 600 users, and have been for almost 2 years. Guaranteed nobody is happy with that.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
1 Fulltime Employee (me(doing my best to fix things)) 1 Fulltime student aid (Help desk) 1 Part-Time student aid (doing his best to fix things) 2 T-1's 1 Frame Relay 3 DSL Connections 14 Sites 27 Servers 500 Desktops 5000 Student-Users (doing their best to break things) 200 Staff-Users (doing their best to break things) "Luckily" in public education, we never had enough IT Support staff... so our ratio really hasn't gotten any worse....
Printing company: 1/2 admin for 25 people, 1 server, 12 workstations (1 person with other duties).
Manufacturing company: 2 admin/programmers for 150 people, 4 servers, 60 workstations. (Programmers are amazingly effective admin, as they can script solutions others would just repetitively apply).
Software company: 1/2 admin/programmer for 5 people, 4 servers.
Sig under construction since 1998.
Large University in New England:
6,000+ Faculty, Staff
25,000+ Students
100-150+ Central IT Staff (plus a couple dozen "freelance" IT withing various departments).
150/(25000+6000) ~= 206 Employees / 1 IT Staff
IT provides groupware, Mainframe batch data processing, file services, workstation deployment and maintenance, helpdesk, custom apps (on Mainframe), HR+Payroll+Student systems, and much more!
10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
Software development company: 7 IT guys for 350 users.
The users happen to be mostly SW engineers: on one hand the don't need a helpdesk, on the other hand they ask a lot from the IT. Overall, both should compensate => 1:50 ratio.
At our place (Fortune 50 company) the pointy-hairs brought in Gardner Group to survey us and the market to prove we had too many NT admins per user like they thought.
The survey result? We have twice as many users per admin than the average in the rest of the industry. Gardner desparately wanted to know from us how we do it!
Not that we should expect any kind of financial compensation for our great job, of course.
The bad news for the rest of you is that Gardner incorporated our count into the average so now you'll look bad.
2 admins, a tech and a part time gopher... supporting over 1000 users total. ~500 dialup, ~250 DSL, and ~250 leased lines. More servers than one can shake a stick at. We also all get paid crap.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
I work as a comp. tech in a major western state university (read rosebowl). In my dept. (the student union building) we have one administator and two student grunts (of which I am) supporting three buildings, 200 users, 1 web server (which runs half the universities web pages), 1 data server, 2 domain controllers, and a whole slew of other smaller various servers. Both of the students work roughly 15 hours a week. The administrator works 40+. One student does comp. tech support and installs, one does server maintanance and setup, the admin does just about everything else. I certainly wish we could get another tech but it's not going to happen. I think I'm happy to have a job at all. Especially one where I can get real experience.
We have one sys-admin for 200+ really old cranky systems. He is also a full-time teacher.
Nationwide user base, supporting network, desktop, mainframe apps. 1 Help Desk tech per approx. 500 users (20 techs, 10000 total users). I take 40-50 calls per 8 hour shift (lots of dinkass password issues), utilize a personal first call resolution of around 70%. I now despise talking on the phone, but it beats roofing!
We've got something like ten IT staff for a building of two hundred or so. So thats 20:1.
However, there are two or three guys who do more work than the other seven combined.
Its not the ratio, its the quality.
2 sysadmins, userbase of ~ 50 000 (we're an ISP), ~ 30 staff, approx 50 servers.
When I started here six months ago there were four sysadmins and two juniors. I thought it was just my company's directorial incompetence (and I'm not dissuaded from the view that they're incompetent), in a way it's comforting to see that others are in the same boat, not that I would wish redundancy on anyone of course.
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
We have about 16000 users
.NET etc.
with a complete IT staff of ~200 (incuding managers)
programmers 80
systech 8
admins 5
~8 VMS
~5 SCO
~12 Unixware
~12 Linux
~15 other.
The last few years have seen us shrink by about 50% The worst thing is all the travel for the systechs, they are on the road now about 80% now.
Actually its not so bad, As we are a MUMPS/CACHE/COBOL shop, we don't need as many people/machines to support a large user base as you would with C or
Thankfully we don't do anything serious with Micro$oft. That really helps.
lb
F X=0:1:9999 F D=2:1 Q:((X>2)&(X#D=0)!((D>X/2)&(X'=1))) I D>(X/2) W:$X>75 ! W X,?$X+5-$l(X) Q
I'm a sysadmin at a K-12 school district. we have just over 16,000 students and 5,000 staff/teachers. We have over 5,000 computers (mixed winnt, win2k, win9x, mac), 40 servers (almost all win2k/winnt), and are beginning to deploy IP telephony (currently ~ 400 phones). We have a core staff of eight people. A Department Head, LAN/WAN Manager, 2 Sysadmins, 2 computer techs, a software support person, and a student management software person (basically a DBA). Additionally, we have five full-time techs for five of our largest buildings.
We also have some auxiallary staff, but they are support staff and do not directly contribute to break/fix and project implementation or planning. We might have ten people fitting that description.
That gives us a grand total of 23 people supporting 21,000 customers at 21 sites. Six of us (the core staff) are crammed into a 20'x15' area. All of the rest have their own offices.
And the funiest part? We get along pretty well. We have a fairly polished web-based Helpdesk system (developed internally) and techs who are very good at supporting anything and everything we have technology-wise.
The only downside to supporting this many users is that we have NO time for training or professional development, so anytime we want to learn something new, we pretty-much have to do it on our own. I've spent probably $4k this year on technology hardware and books, including Cisco switches and a firewall, and certification tests and so forth.
All in all, it's an interesting place to work for with some really cool co-workers.
Location 2 admin, 1 dba, and 5 help desk for approx 600 users. Company wide 8 admin, 5dba, approx 20 help desk for approx 3000 users, so roughly 1:100
If privacy had a tombstone it would read "We did it for your own good" . -- John Twelve Hawks
Non Sequitur \Non seq"ui*tur\ [L., it does not follow]
n 1: a reply that has no relevance to what preceded it
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Well that's for hands on people. I am the only physical presence for 2 offices about 20 miles apart with a total of 250 users. The server admin staff is about 10 people and they support about 5K people in a huge number of locations across the NE. Networking is about the same. So total support people for ~5K users is 40:5K or 1:125.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
and it looks like this:
- About 550 PCs (mostly old crap held together with duct tape and a prayer running 9x. Most of which _have_ to run about 30 different kinds of POS children's "educational" software)
- 6 servers (reasonably solid, but old-ish. running NT or Linux)
- About 170 full-time users (employees) and 1700 part-time users (students)
- Plus about a dozen big network printers, about 150 inkjet printers, 5 (slightly different) digital phone systems, and a website.
All supported by.... Me. For a little over 30k a year. Whee! Be thankful you aren't in k-12 education in the Pacific Northwest. As far as I can tell, this is pretty typical.
Dogbert's Tech Support can support any size of user base with only one tech!
Our shop has two IT employees, myself and my boss. We provide tech support and consulting services to a number of small businesses in the local area. We probably have about 200 customers, of which maybe 50 are regular callers.
So the ratio? Two IT techs for somewhere around 500 users. At least, that's what I'm guessing.
OK, so systems aren't "managed." We don't write policies and procedures. We don't give reports to upper management. Most of our users are fairly unconcerned about internal security. We don't give training on individual programs; our focus is networking, however we do support other software when we need to where we can. In that sense, our workload per user is fairly light.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Wait, I'm both the admin _and_ the full-time employee.
No boss, I'm not browsing /., I'm doing technical research! You don't know anything! What're you gonna do, fire me?
slap!
Yes dear. I'll stop wasting time and get back to work now.
The number of IT staff usually depends more on the complexity of the network then the number of users. Two seasoned techs can handle 4 hundred (been there, done that) users when it is nothing but a basic cubicle farm, where all you have to do is ghost, reset passwords, and replace hardware once in a while. But this same network might also have 20 servers, SQL databases, third party solutions that need scripters, two T3 lines, isolated data farms, etc, that demand two telecommunication specialists, 5 admins, a dba, and 2 developers. If the only factor that you went off of was the amount of users involved, then two techs and an admin would have been fine.
We spend most of our time dealing with a few very specific issues (such as a citrix metaframe server), chronic problems and problem patterns (often caused by user-installed and virus-like downloaded software, containing adware), and a few very troublesome users. These troublesome issues and people consume most of our time, while the rest of the users rarely need any help.
There are no trolls. There are no trees out here.
The machine count here is rock-solid, the "STAFF" count can be be artificially inflated by "role" accounts and failure to disable ex-staff.
My database tells me:
These are all Windows shops.
My personal experience and our market research shows you could go with somewhat higher ratios in an all-Mac shop, at least pre- OS X
1 IT Man/Developer/DBA/Phone guy 1 Support/Webmaster 300 Employee ~50 Computer ~25 Telnet ~25 Other... We could get by with one, but someone must be here at all times... $55 / $35
I'm at a major university in New England, doing IT support for the athletics department and here's our breakdown:
420 Users of which...
250 are full time staff that we support.
And doing the support? Me. That's it. 1:250. And I not only do desktop support, but I also aid in account creation, manage the IT systems budget and 4 year hardware replacement plan, handle telephone technical support and trouble shooting and deal with anything else that pops up.
And yet my direct supervisor doesn't see a problem with this ratio. It's a wonder I haven't been killed by my users yet...
*sigh*
If I could only live my life with my threshold at 4...
This is a Government agency:
~3,000+ users
6 Systems Admins + 1 manager
2 AS/400 people
~25 desktop techs
~8 programmers
~30 other IT people that do absolutely nothing
~70 servers, including an AS/400
3 of the 6 SysAdmins do essentially nothing, so I figure 3 + 2 + 25 + 8 = 38 people for about 3,000 users, or a little more than 1 to 100.
I got moved to a position to lead a tech team of five people handling 400 machines. It was ugly, everyone was running all the time and putting in OT (15 hrs OT/wk). All the machines were mismatched, the IP's were statically addressed in a haphazard manner without adequate logging. Machines were consistantly fixed by ghosting then adjusting for hardware. Changes were made to projects but not implemented on a full floor manner. We would often drop whatever we were doing when we had someone with a real emergency.
These are the gremlins of poor planning and horrible managing.
We spent some money on contractors to ease our workload. They were handling some of the more mundane stuff. We had enough time to FIX THE UNDERLYING ISSUES. It sucked getting the entire crew onboard to deal with problems that weren't fires. They didn't want to fix something that wasn't a right here right now type issue.
It took about 3 months, the contractors disappeared. We were given more users to deal with 700, lost a tech. Things were going ok, We got new machines that were identical. WE spent DAYS CHECKING THE BASELINE PROCESS FOR FLAWS THEN SPENT A WEEK HAVING USERS TEST IT. Once we rolled out a good process with reasonable hardware things went well. We got more contracts upped the count to 1500 machines. Hiring freeze left us without extra techs (4 total). We were handling it without problems (playing games 8 hours a week).
There it is: A good setup can make 400 machines per tech easy, a bad one can tax a technician at 80 machines.
P.S. Eventually they downsized to 200 machines, leaving 2 techs. We got pretty goot at first person shooters.
I dug into this quite a bit earlier last year to justify a new hire. The best formula I found came out of this whitepaper.
:/ That's to support 120-150 users on about 100 workstations with two major vendor platforms... the kicker for us, though, is they are spread out at about eleven sites, which ups our requirements considerably. You have either travel time, or telephone time, or crawling VNC link time to account for--I could do the same number all at one site for a lot less.
In a nutshell, the formula is:
HR = W/500 + U/1000 + C/15 + A/50 + L/25 + V
where HR is total IT staff required, W is number of workstations, U is number of users, C is workgroups (clusters of users, basically--physical sites is how I count it), A is the number of supported applications, L is the total licenses required, and V is the number of distinct vendor platforms to be supported (operating systems, basically). That is about as good a predictor as I could find, although it's not magic--you can still have variations based on the specific requirements for the department.
Using that, I get a figure of 3.8 FTE; in reality, we have 2 FTE and a consultant who may as well be another.
It's nice to think that your salary would go up if you were making do with less and getting the same results, but in practice you pretty much get stuck with industry standard in your area, unless you get particularly astute employers who know the value of what they are getting out of you.
Hope that helps!
No relation to Happy Monkey
This must be about the norm for school systems. In a former life, I was a "School-based Technology Specialist." I was the man for a school of 2400. I stayed pretty busy.
In a previous life -
1800 users, two sites
3 server/LAN/DNS/firewall admins (includes mgr)
8 pc support
6 help desk
40-60 mainframe support/systems people (big mainframe useage here)
Things were hectic here, but we provided very quick turn around on requests.
Currently -
~6700 users, ~52 sites
50-60 server/help desk/pc support
9 LAN/WAN/firewall
8 Unix admins
~70 assorted MVS support staff
10 DBA types
and 7 roaming senior staff best described as an in-house consulting team.
Currently a major clusterfuck, 1 week turn around is common for a simple security change, and PC procurement can take a month - assumming the PC idiots aren't instituting one of their regular 'moratoriums' on new work so they can try to catch up on backlogged move-add-changes.
I have read through the responses, and they are all pretty much the same. I personally configure Cisco devices, plan/deploy security, configure/maintain our web sites and FTP servers, handle help desk, and fix in-house machines along with anything else theat needs to get done (Hey Mon). I'm burnt. The IT community is overworked and needs to form a union. This will not happen though, as not all IT personnel are created equal (Administrating a Winblows server/workstation is easy enough for the average Mcworker-turned-IT to do). Personally, I would join a union if for nothing else other than to give the business world a little reminder of what they have (and because any bagger at Safeway has a retirement plan, and we don't).
Our IT staff is 6, with 250 endusers/200 desktops. Our company manufactures and sells a very diverse line of products - that range from recreation to clothing to food products. We do a fair amount of in-house software development as well.
1 SysAdmin maintains:
1 Sun server
1 BSD server
3 SCO servers
14 Linux servers
18 NetWare servers
2 WinNT servers
1 Win2K servers
8 Frame Relay lines
9 Cisco routers
1 X25 circuit - PPP
1 PRI circuit - faxes
6 Inter-office VPNs, plus their internet links
2 PtP wireless links - 1.5Mbit/sec for Internet
ZENWorks admin for aprox 200 desktops
In-house email and DNS services for aprox 25 domains/250 users.
1 Win32 Developer maintains:
Various Access97 based apps
DB/EDI data mapping
1 DBA/Report-runner
1 Corp trainer
1 Webmaster/helpdesk
16 websites - 2 high traffic
First-level Win32 tech.
1 Boss maintains
13 Voicemail systems
13 Phone switches
DBA for major internal DB
2 T1's - phone
Present site - twenty five staff covering twenty servers and three hundred users across four countries, plus a total of six hundred tills that must NEVER go down. I'm going bald and gray running it all.
Okay: Major auto parts chain (3-stepper)...5 major distribution centers, 120+ retail/wholesale outlets across 3 states (individual company part of an international chain). Vast majority wholesale (80%+) with few walk-in sales.
Each store averages 4 terminals and 2 printers, with as many users as terminals. Each DC is usually 10-16 terminals and 4-7 printers. Stores and DCs each have a central Linux box acting as a serial terminal/printer controller, print spooler, firewall, router, and desktop PC for email, web browsing, and office applications.
Our central office has another 200 or so users with as many PCs, and around 30 printers.
Our central computer center has about 30-40 servers, a mix between Linux, SCO, and a couple odd NT boxes.
IT Side:
(1) IT Director
(1) Operations manager
(1) Production manager
(1) NT Sysadmin/PC support
(1) Computer tech/PC support
(1) Network/Communications/SCO/Linux admin/Systems analyst/2nd backup DBA (me)
(1) DBA / Systems analyst
(1) Programmer/analyst / backup DBA
(2) Programmer/analysts
(4) Computer operators (grunts, daily/nightly job runs, backups, babysitting the *big* printers, etc.)
Support side:
(1) Support director
(2) Support staff
The operations manager above is shared 50% with this dept as well.
The production manager above acts in a 2nd tier support capacity to some extent.
Here's the quick summary:
approx 760 users at any given moment of business hours
approx 560 terminals and 200 workstations
approx 300 printers
approx 130 locations across 3 states
3 admins (net/sys/dba/etc)
1 PC tech/workstation support
5 application/remote user support
3 programmers/analysts
4 operators
Total about 17 IT and ISS staff
17/760 = about 1/44 IT/ISS to user ratio
* Programmer/analyst == programmer+1 (not a grunt programmer, but takes care of all aspects of their individual projects, including investigation, planning, design, implementation, etc).
At a previous job, I was the sole sysadmin, dba, developer, and general tech support (only cause I was the only one that knew how to fix things) for a 4M hits/day site.
I told them it was a bad situation... if I ever left, or got sick, etc. they were screwed.
They realized they were short staffed (even if just for redunancy) when I took a vacation and suddenly nothing was getting done. More importantly it made *them* look bad to their bosses. Then they finally realized they needed to hire a "clone" in case I was out, sick, left, etc...
and the dotcom where I worked, it was 1-to-100 admins to NT4 servers. helpdesk was about 1-to-20 (I could do that with my eyes closed).