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

Right now where I work.

[Neck_of_the_Woods]

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.

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 situation...

[Ummagumma]

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!

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.

overworked?

[Kevin Stevens]

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.

Just one perspective

[Strange Ranger]

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.

I'm grossly overwhelmed.

[aidoneus]

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*

Went through this to justify a position last year

[ScuzzMonkey]

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.

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. :/ 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.

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!