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?"

Comments

admin = human too

[storem]

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!

Depends on the environment.

[FreeLinux]

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.

All IT people are not created equal

[Directrix1]

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.

Re:All IT people are not created equal

[araven]

Thank you! I run an IT department in a smallish (~200 person) organization, and that is the most DIFFICULT thing to get across to the rest of management. For whatever reason, staff here think they'll get better results from bothering my programmers if they can't print, and telling long sagas about their need for new application functionality to my poor sysadmins. That said, we're comfortable, but not too comfortable with our staffing ratio here.

We have ~200 workstations, mostly PC but some Mac, and we're headed for Linux as much as possible. Server side we're 13 Suns (Ultra10-E5500), 2 NetApp filers (talk about low maintenance!) and 8 Win2K. For those machines, we've got 1 UNIX admin, 1 admin/manager and 3 Windows admins. These folks also do our telephone admin work, user training, asset management, and "whatever else comes up." We have two guys who do nothing but network and security administration (56-site WAN, keeps 'em hopping). We've also got three big-gun programmers since I'm allergic to outsourcing and we can't get things we need off-the-shelf.

By comfortable, but not too comfortable, I mean that we have time for long lunches, don't ever turn down vacation requests, have time to send people for training, and let 'em read trade rags at work. Our jobs are mostly 40 hour jobs. Our turnover is incredibly low, and for two out of the last four years, we had NO ONE leave the department. That all said, we have lots of projects, and unsophisticated users who keep us hopping most of the time.

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