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

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!

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!