Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: How Do I Convince Management To Hire More IT Staff?
An anonymous reader writes "I work at a manufacturing company. We have roughly 150 employees, 130 desktops, 8 physical servers, 20 virtual servers + a commercial SAN. We're a Windows shop with Exchange 2013. That's the first part. The second part is we have an ERP system that controls every aspect of our business processes. It has over 100 customizations (VB, but transitioning over to C#). We also have 20 or so custom-made support applications that integrate with the ERP to provide a more streamlined interface to the factory workers in some cases, and in other cases to provide a functionality that is not present in the ERP at all. Our IT department consists of: 1 Network Administrator (me), 4 Programmers (one of which is also the IT Manager). I finally convinced our immediate boss that we need another network support person to back me up (but he must now convince the CEO who thinks we have a large IT department already). I would like them to also hire dedicated help desk people. As it stands, we all share help desk duties, but that leads to projects being seriously delayed or put on hold while we work on more mundane problems. It also leads to a good amount of stress, as I can't really create the solid infrastructure I want us to have, and the developers are always getting pressure from other departments for projects they don't have the manpower to even start. I'm not really sure how to convince them we need more people. I need something rather concrete, but there are widely varying ratios of IT/user ratios in different companies, and I'm sure their research turned up with some generic rule of thumb that leads them to believe we have too many already. What can we do?"
The point you have to make is not you need to hire more people, it goes beyond that. Point 1) document the time you are "wasting" with tasks bellow your competence. Point 2) do the math, show them how much they could save, both with productivity lost in important projects, and most importantly, how much they could save shifting more mundane tasks with cheaper people. Point 3) Document the expenses with outside contractors (if any). Point 4) Make the case for outlining responsibilities and areas of competences. People dont ask airline pilots to pick up trash, or give food to travellers, well again, because their work is expensive. Also, people dont expect taxi drivers to be able to fly a jet. Point 5) Learn to say no. Either when you dont have competences or time. Point 6) Learn when how to say I dont know. Point 7) Know when it is time to outsource some services, either in complex or lengthy tasks.
In addition to the IT department wanting more people, probably shipping, accounting, sales, and just about every other group in the company wants to hire more people. And everyone probably has a good reason, a clear benefit or savings to the company if they get the people they want.
As the company can't invest in all of these projects (and hire all those people), they'll be careful before they add staff to any group. This is pretty standard. It's not enough that you say "I need more people so we can finish projects on time and get a great network infrastructure." You have to be able to say "lack of IT staff is hurting X groups and costs the company $X"
Why not look at it another way? Instead of asking for more people, look at the issues being brought up with help desk work. Are you spending 8 hours a day resetting passwords? Maybe you can give the users the ability to reset their own passwords. Or maybe some training will pay off dividends and allow people to make less help desk calls. Cut down on the help required and you can effectively have more time for other things (without needing to hire someone else). You'll look like a hero. Just start tracking what type of issues come in and you'll be able to use that to build your case to management.
Nonstandard way of doing it:
- Ignore the issue. Assume you can handle everything thrown at you. Overwork yourself trying to get everything done.
- Burn out. Collapse under the workload. All IT work grinds to a halt due to lack of sane employees. This might or might not convince the management there could be an issue somewhere.
- Snap. Apply violence, preferably to inanimate objects. Property damage and blood spatters do tend to get the management's attention very quickly. Carefully explain the issue at hand while they're still listening.
My direct superior went down this path. He doesn't work here anymore, but his little outburst did result result in our boss-type-people finally fixing pretty much everything he had been complaining about for years.
I used to WRITE industry-leading ERP software, AND I used to manage 120 offices equipped with desktops at the same time, AND run the cable myself through the ceilings. And (other than writing the software) I did it entirely on my own, until I got overworked and hired an assistant.
That might be a bit less but look at the scale here: you have 4 programmers, programming shit the ERP company should be supplying you already (OUR customers didn't have to know how to program). You need 2 "network support" people although I did all the network support by myself back in the day when Ethernet was just being marketed. We didn't have it yet. It's so goddamned much simpler today I have to wonder what the problem is. If the 8 servers need a lot of maintenance then you didn't do it right in the first place.
Where your company sucks is help desk. Managers, engineers & other hands-on people should not be doing help desk in this day and age. That's just ridiculous. Tell your management to get some decent help-desk software (some good stuff is FREE!) and hire some (relatively cheap) clerical workers or PHONE JOCKEYS, for Christ's sake, and get that monkey off your back. It doesn't belong there.
That's cheaper (and often better) than trying to pay tech staff to handle support. You do need to set up a good Wiki (or similar) for FAQ and answered issues, but at least you have gatekeepers to keep people off your back all the time.
And honestly: if you need 4 programmers to do your ERP, you're buying it from the wrong people.
As a simple version of this: just log activities of the IT staff for a month or so.
Make sure you do it with sufficient granularity (that's tricky) and then highlight what time is spent on help-desking and solving other people's problems, and (in a different color), what time is spent on actually improving things.
Now your business case, assuming the logged period is fairly standard, is evident: here is how IT is forced to spent its time, and here is what is left by the wayside.