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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?"
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.