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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
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.
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.
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
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...
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!
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
That doesn't sound *too* bad. Can the admin ask a user to wait until a student's next shift or do they have to go do whatever (clear paper jam, install optional Office component, etc.) themselves? Does the admin do web design or just keep the web server going. If they have to work on web content, that sounds out of line. How often is a problem caused by a user doing something they shouldn't like installing a game? Some places are okay with small IT staffs because users stick to their tasks. Are user's machines locked down at all (non-Local Admin in NT/2k/XP)? Do all the machines have antivirus software which is automaticallly running and kept up-to-date?
A lot of times IT staff to user ratios are not a reflection of how much work there is but what the user expectations are. If IT staff have to respond to every call *right now*, you need a lot of staff. If users don't expect same day response, you can get away with less.