How Many Admins Per User/Computer Have You Seen?

miffo.swe writes "I'm trying to find the normal ratio of technicians/support tech per user or computer in your average IT-shop. When searching around, I can't find that many examples or any statistics. We manage around 900 computers (mostly Windows XP) and 25+ servers (mostly Linux). There are around 2600 users of varying knowledge, mostly pretty low. I can't find any statistics on this, so real-world examples are very welcome since we do this with one sysadmin (me) and two sneaker techs. Are we seriously understaffed, or is this normal?"

Comments

100 to 1 is about right

[alen]

we're at around 1200 users and around 8 help desk people to support them all. 2 DBA's for 30 some MS SQL servers and 3-5 admins for 200 some windows/^nix servers. some people double by helping users in their office

Support/user ratio

[SoundGuyNoise]

Here's what we've had at different jobs:

Internal Corporate Helpdesk - 6800 users, supporting every application on desktops, 10 support techs during the day, 1 on nights and weekends.

Website support: 10,000 users, supporting general usage of just 1 website. 4 techs, regular business hours only.

Re:Support/user ratio

[StrategicIrony]

I've run about 700:1 ratio before. Of course, we were 2400 staff and 4 techs. It wasn't too bad because first thing in the morning, one of the techs would make sure we always had 3-5 good running PCs in spare for each type of image in the building and we solved a lot of problems with "swap the machine". A tech could create 5 images in less than 20 minutes of real "desk time" using my network deployment setup.

When an organization staffs that way, nobody gets to bitch when the answer to most problems is "re-image" because we found out that doing more detailed troubleshooting for anyone under Director level, or one of the few critical technology people simply put us too far in the hole time-wise to get anything else done. It's faster to tell them to copy their data to the network, then go down and make sure they did it right and swap the machine. They can copy the data back after we set up their email. Max time on a support call that way was ~15 minutes and solved ANY problem.

We actually managed to move an entire building of people from one place to the other in our spare time at that position as well as deploying wireless and doing about a dozen other things. It wasn't a sweatshop - it was actually one of the nicer places to work I've been to.

We were running a wide variety of apps, which we solved by having 3 standard images that provided a substantial coverage of everything. Once the image was built, there was never any reason to install "apps" because they were on the image. There were two or three that weren't included that had strict controls on who could use them, but they were 1-2 minutes to install.

if you can standardize the hardware and application images, this 680:1 isn't insane at all.

Too many chiefs and no indians

[grapeape]

Right now its 4 offices around 120 employees and just me...oh and I forgot (or selectively blocked) a former client who keeps calling me to pick up after their new "IT guy" who is supposed to save them money. If they were all in one location I could probably juggle it better but as it is I'm starting to burn out.

I think you're understaffed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Government facility:
3000+ PCs
2600+ users(yeah I know we have more PCs than users)
200+ servers

6 Server Admins (understaffed)
2 Network Admins
2 Telecom Admins
3 Infrastructure techs
15 Helpdesk Technicians (overstaffed by about 5)

47 other IT employees for software support/dev staff and management staff