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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?"
Standard way of doing it:
- Outline what's wrong with the current undersized staff, where are the bottlenecks, what's being held up because there aren't enough people.
- Explain how this hurts the company's bottom line.
- Explain how hiring another person will solve the current problems, increase efficiency, and in the medium to long term, increase revenues more than the cost of hiring this new person.
If your case is well built, it'll be self-explanatory. If your boss/manager is reasonable, they will see the benefit of hiring a new person. If they don't seem to see the benefit and refuse to see the logic of your case, either
1/ you haven't built a good enough case (your fault)
2/ your boss is a jerk and you should quit
3/ something fishy is going on at your company (such as the company having run out of cash and being unable to hire, even if it'd make sense) and you probably should quit as well
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The simplest, and most effective way to get what you want is to prove that your staffing approach will save man hours/time/money. That is your only effective recourse. If you can't do this you are SOL.
If you are stuck between mundane (e.g. boss's email not working) and serious (e.g. database servers are not responding), it may be wiser to offload that part at a lower cost per employee (instead of a network admin to be a backup while you work on help desk issues)?
I've seen the problem where expensive servers are never installed (they sit unplugged for months) because people are busy fixing email client configs...
I think you should write down your job responsibilities and figure out the high priority ones that add value to the company, and the less valuable ones that you can offload to a second person or dedicated help desk.
Adding extra staff reduces profitability, so you need to convince your manager and help him convince the CEO that the benefit of freeing up your time to do higher value activities will:
a) Increase efficiency
b) Reduce cost in the medium term
c) Increase reliability or security i.e. preventing hacking incidents etc.
Also, you could calculate your average hourly salary and see whether freeing up your time would justify hiring a new person.
A lot of graphs and charts showing correlations between more IT staff and productivity, revenue, downtime, and output. :-)
I used to work for a company with 150 machines, 10+ servers, few lazer cutters running windows (of all things).
Programming was outsourced.
That job required 1 IT engineer, and, 1 IT manager.
We also operated CCTV systems, when requested by management.
Onsite callouts to external users, etc etc.
Yeah, it was a family run company. You know the kind, workload piles up whilst you prioritize the family members requests (no matter how silly they were).
It sounds like you have the numbers, just in the wrong place.
"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,"
Theres another problem right there. Sounds like your programmers are simply throwing out quantity, instead of one quality application. It will bite them in the ass later down the line.
I honestly think your company should only have 2 programmers, 2 IT engineers.
I wouldnt be surprised if they sacked the extra programmer and made the IT manager focus on IT, instead of programing.
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.
You should have timesheets detailing everything you actually do, a list of tasks that need to be done as well as time estimates against them. Present that as your business case. Remember though staff are very expensive, for such a small organisation that is actually a lot of developers but maybe 1 too few admins, perhaps they should also be looking at utilisation of more off the shelf stuff rather than extremely expensive customisations.
For getting support from managers, you need to take talk a language managers understand:
* Return on Investment for infrastructure improvements
* Write-off rates on existing and new equipment--and the effort required for replacing them.
* Risks involved with having out-dated infrastructure--preferably expressed in dolar amounts.
This all boils down to getting actual figures / accurate estimates for the amount of funding involved in supporting the infrastructure, servers and desktops at acceptable levels of continuity.
The programming members of your team need to be assertive and explain the planning consequences of the demands placed on them, so that management can make informed decisions on priorities. When the priorities are clear, the programmers need to stick to them and refer people who do not like that to management instead of trying to please everybody.
Been there, done that.
When you talk to managers, you need to talk business. Throw every reason you think important into the trashcan. Then build your case from the ground up as a business case. Show that it saves the company money or increases productivity. Basically, make the case that your proposal == more $$$.
If management has ever complained about IT being slow or unproductive or their new iPad taking a week to set up - that's your door. Show them how productivity would increase with the expensive IT guys doing the IT work and lots-cheaper help desk guys doing the cheap work. Make sure to use the word "waste" a lot, because it's a red flag to managers - you they leave with the fear that they are wasting company resources unless they follow your proposal, but without you having said that directly, because they have to think they came up with that conclusion themselves.
And read up on the bikeshed problem - include some trivial, easily understood parameters in your proposal that management can discuss and decide upon.
And finally, understand that there may be reasons you don't know about that could lead to your proposal being rejected no matter how good it is. I once got a project rejected that everyone agreed was good because the company was about to merge with another one and nobody wanted to make a decision in that order of magnitude (a few million) because management had already begun the "there's one of us in each company but only one position in the merged one..." game.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
And in the end: do not let it give you stress. You are not running your company. Just make sure that the risk of their current decisions are communicated, don't assume they know.
Otherwise ask for a longvacation in 6 months. If you come back and things still are running, you worried too much. Also the fact that the lead IT mananger is a programmer is a bit worriesome. ..
Q. How Do I Convince Management To Hire More IT Staff?
A. you don't.
Mostly harmless.
For that size? 4 Programmers???
Fire 2 developers and hire 1 temp for occasional network staff.
I know Network Admins that manage 1000-5000 workstations. Easily.
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.
I'll be honest, you seem to have a large IT department. You have 4 programmers, and that seems out of whack. Now you are a manufacturer are these programmers actually working on internal business systems (so truly IT), or are they actually involved in developing end user software firmware etc (product development).
If it product development they need to be moved into the development department with the engineers, though the IT manager would then come underneath the product development manager which maybe politically problematic but needs to be done.
If it is just for internal systems development and support, frankly your doing too much customization of your internal system. I think you'll find that the payback with a company the size your described , for automating and streamlining every process, by heavy modifications to the ERP are actually not there. Get the IT manager to fight against further scope creep of the ERP, sack a programmer or 2 and get in more true IT support staff.
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.
You should track how you and your staff spend time for a week or so (a typical week). Then you should point out how much effort (FTEs) mundane support tasks are taking, and how much is left for system development, programming.
When you do that, do point out the extra penalty for efficiency due to constantly have to answer support request. (assuming it is inevitable)
Then list all requests for system improvements, what are the benefits of each when looking from a business perspective (bottom line impact). Do a rough estimate of development time, vs your limited capacity, and thus how long (if ever) the request pipeline will be cleared.
You should then lay three options for management: forsake a part of the $ benefits from improving the system, out source development or hire more staff. You can compare the cost of each alternative to make the decision of easier... (opportunity cost in the first alternative)
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
First ask yourself what the priority of your CEO is. Does he really care about the IT department, does he see it merely as a cost or as adding value to the company? My experience is that in manufacturing, this is mostly not the case (as opposed e.g. to the financial services vertical). Furthermore, are there real problems with IT being exposed to senior management, e.g. was there a big loss of data that caused the entire factory to come to a grinding halt? Or do you guys do a good job, make sure that everything keeps running (with the necessary overtime, stress, cursing, ...) with just some occasional failure that never even surfaces because it has hardly a financial impact?
Unless you will be able to convince the CEO that either his business will increase because of an additional FTE on IT, or that a huge risk of production loss (= financial loss) can be mitigated using additional staff, your chances to convincing him will be nearly zero. I suppose your IT manager has gone over this exercise a few times as well...
Tip of the day: don't tell the CEO about your nitty gritty techy projects you want to do, like "creating the solid infrastructure you want to have". They couldn't possibly care less about what you want, they care only about the benefit for the company (which in turn after the yearly numbers have been published, turns into a benefit for them personally).
To justify spending on any project, you have to explain why it is worth spending money on. This is standard practice for any large expenditure.
It's a simple concept, but it's hard to do well.
Simply identify the benefits of hiring someone, and their value. If the additional value is more than their cost, by the required return, they'll spend the money.
If you spend your time doing other stuff, point out you spend x% of your time doing this other stuff, and if you consider the context switching overhead you're very inefficient. That's often enough to hire a jr support guy.
Hire a temp, it's usually easier to get a temp approved to knock down ticket times. Make them your Helpdesk person and have them handle basic low profile stuff. Temps are less threatening to management but do this every time you get backlogged eventually it will be cheaper to hire someone than to keep paying a staffing company. At the very least you'll get help to lighten the load even if only temporarily.
The way I see it - the "IT Department" is really just you because the programmers are more akin to an "Engineering" or Tooling department IMO. Are the programmers providing IT support? If so, this is a double edged sword for obvious reasons.
I have worked in offices only slightly smaller than that company and we needed at least two people most days - and we had the benefit of having outside help for a lot of things (having a high staff turn-over didn't help).
I think it's worth making a business case focused argument rather than a "we need help" based one. Perhaps you should get the help of a manager who is not in the "IT Department" to help build, mentor and deliver the case. This isn't necessarily because your existing IT Manager is incompetent, but mostly because he is too close to the issue at hand and is unlikely to be taken seriously because of it. He also sounds like a typical tech guy - and thus probably isn't quite as tuned into non-IT culture.
Tell the boss you can get rid of the four programmers by using a new super AI scripting system that only you can program. Tell him with the money he saves on the four salaries, he can pay three of those salaries to you on top of your normal one, and he's still going to save money! Win-Win! Next, you need to gain access to your Windows boxes without a gui: Simply install a Russian botnet, with a web based control interface. You can get an old one from any online Mafia surplus store. Next, you can simulate the AI system using a dozen cheap Indian IT professionals who simply do the needful overnight via the web interface. Demonsrate the system to the boss, claiming it's a natural language interface (don't mention the Indians). Make sure you finish the demo with a difficult task which is written in incomprehensible New Zealander slang, to show that the system still has just a few bugs left. When the boss is impressed, ask for another $500k to develop the system, promising joint marketing rights when it's finished. When difficulties arise in the next 6 months, ignore them, claiming you have coding to do and the final version will solve everything. At some point you will get fired. Use the golden parachute you negotiated after 3 months, when you were claiming that Google have been pestering you with job offers twice each day (proved using forged emails).
Now relax, count your money on the beach in Acapulco, and install an experimental version of Arch Linux on your Beowulf cluster of Raspberry Pi's. Log onto the Internets using your satellite phone, and help newbies with their sysadmin questions long into the sunset.
no.
just label 4 of the guys as part of the factory production team. that's what they are.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I work in inner-city schools. My last job was for independent (private) schools.
We had 380 kids, 50 staff, 50 desktops, 50 laptops, 50 netbooks, 50 tablets. We tied it all in on site, with VoIP phones, structured cabling and also wireless, dozens of apps (some dating back decades), dozens of printers, access control, CCTV, even the boilers were computer-controlled. Every classroom was kitted out with projector, whiteboard, phone, laptop point, printer, and a few bits of miscellany. It was all wired back to 6 servers, and we offloaded quite a lot of external stuff like email to Google Apps.
There was me. Just me. And an independent audit recommend we get someone else to help me but it was going to be just an apprentice.
The computer systems ran everything, including a bunch of legally required systems and the finance (several million pounds a year just in school fees, for instance). Building projects happened every Summer and generally added several rooms and meant recabling large parts of the building every six months or so.
Outside contracting was limited to cable running (not even crimping, etc.) and third-line support. We had a helpdesk ticketing system, regular computer-based exams that affected the children's education if they weren't run properly, an MIS that held stupidly critical information and was in use by the staff every moment of every day.
And, I'd like to reiterate, there was just me. Now, I left because of overburden but that was after 5 years of all the above running quite happily and only THEN (after a staff change) did they try to pile duties like managing the boiler control systems (what the hell do I know about gas boilers the size of a room?), overriding all my freedoms and choices (ordered a VoIP phone - normally £100 and next-day delivery.... six months later, the order still hadn't even gone through the system) and expecting decisions-by-committee where the committees still wouldn't exist six months later.
As such, I left not because of the IT workload but because of the management bullshit that suddenly appeared above me and stopped me doing my job. Several others left with me, and the number of constructive dismissal claims went through the roof.
And you're sitting there with 4 programmers and 2 "general" IT staff on something that I would consider - at best - equivalent, and moaning? My sympathy isn't with you. I made more than 100 customisations to a single process on a single machine, running more than 25 separate major functions which was so funny that I used to label them (e.g. "Fax-to-email server", "Intranet server", etc.) on the side of the machine and I ran out of room on a tower case. Hell, just the copy of Hylafax I was always scared to upgrade because it had so many home-brew patches and configuration quirks that it took a long time to do so from the bare source.
Multiply that up by the various other servers, failovers, etc. and I did more programming on them than I did any other kind of tech support. One of them even had some electronic relay control boards that I had to design and build myself, controlled by that same machine and even controllable remotely via authenticated SMS message (heavily patched gammu installation).
So in terms of your people ratios, I have little sympathy. And you have a LOT of programmers to make your life easier. I spent most of my time chasing external tech support for stupid unresolvable issues in binary software that they refused to update/support. Things like hard-coding the version of Flash required but not being able to recognise two-digit major numbers (e.g. Flash 10), the company going bust 10 years ago, but the software being "vital" to the school's curriculum. Things like software running under Windows 95 "everyone is local admin" conditions but having to deployed in the two IT suites and various standalone and staff laptop machines such that children could run it unsupervised.
Couple in heavy web filtering, huge legal requirements (all staff machines
From the OP:
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.
IF getting the projects done were THAT big of an issue, the CEO would be solving the problem. And...
... 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."
Pressure from other departments? And? Here's what you say, "Talk to my manager. I have no say in that."
It's obvious to me that there are plenty of resources for what this company needs.
I keep seeing that HE wants them to hire dedicated people and HE wants an infrastructure that HE thinks they should have. The OP is incorrect on what he thinks his company needs.
A: Quit.
Silence is a state of mime.
Your main issue is: in every single sentence you told us you said "I want", "I need" something to essentially make the situation better for you and your co-workers and you want the company to spend money for that. This is completely useless since all they hear is you asking for a favor to make your life and your job easier for YOU, and you presented mildly or barely business-relevant arguments as a justification for that but your main points were presented about YOU and your team. It is not an issue for management if you and your coworkers are overworked as long as things are still running; they will brush that off as "the geeks are just whining" or "times are tough but it will get better". It obviously has not been an issue so far that certain projects got delayed. And "we could do better" is something managers don't care about because it is universally always true even if you are the leader in that area.
You mean well but you are selling it completely wrong. If you really want to work on bettering the situation then you got to learn to play politics and understand business and partially go against what feels natural for a tech. That means you need to establish an actual issue in the managers' minds first. This could mean weeks, months if not years of pointing to an issue when it pops up and showing how it affected the business in a negative way. But be warned, nobody likes bad news and to be constantly nagged, so you will need tact. It could be done opportunistically, piggy-backing a crisis. Bob in accounting not being able to start his Excel fast enough is not such an issue. Losing a client because your infrastructure could not provide the necessary information is a very real cause to do something. The whole network being down and nobody being able to access their emails for two days because your only network admin was sick or on vacation is a very serious business risk to consider. If you have shady ethics then such an incident can work wonders if management really does not understand how serious the situation is of not having a backup admin for vital infrastructure. Managers love their emails, that is a point they will instantly understand.
Don't tell them what they should do, show them the real business-relevant issues and be prepared for them to completely ignore it despite all the sense you are making - running a business means constantly balancing more or less serious issues with very serious issues and crises and often getting it wrong and if there is no money then your issues could be severe but they still might be unable to do anything because there simply is no money. If they do listen, be ready to make suggestions and keep things simple and clear. There is a very descriptive saying, "pictures for kids and executives", that is how simple and clear you should keep it. Never argue with "too much work".
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
Two things; Never go to management with a problem, go with a solution and show them the money they'll make/save by implementing your solution.
Then, if it doesn't work, it's safe to forget it. Management doesn't want to think, but, they do want to make money, if it doesn't increase profits,don't hold your breath.
That IS what business is about; profit.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
You can make any arguments to management that you want, but I've done more with less and I recommend you do the same. Take charge learn your systems and become the expert who doesn't need help. Then go get a new job or start a firm as an IT consultant. Your first client can be the one you leave.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
One way to indicate to upper management - change the priority to the other projects and let things like printers and network problems go unresolved and state that it won't be fixed until we have achieved milestone Y for project X.
When the CEO comes in and rambles about printers not working - then let him choose between printer and a penalty for not meeting deadline for project X.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Talk money: man hours, capital investment, returns.
Will it profit the company?
This is a language problem. Know your audience, use their language
Restrain your Tech nature. Management doesn't care and never will -- just shut up about it.
-kgj
Off-hand, four programmers for a manufacturing company with 150 employees seems a bit high. Is your current application environment really so inadequate or dynamic that you need four people to keep up with the changes?
But yes, a dedicated Help Desk Tech for day-to-day "box won't boot" problems is cheap and effective.
This is what your senior managers are often most concerned about.
The way I see it you need to figure out how much it costs the business if function X breaks. If the network fails, how much does the business lose per day.
Let's not forget there is an additional cost if the usual staff cannot do their work, time lost to restore backups etc.
Now factor the cost of getting some adhoc help via an external company in case of emergency. Eventually the network will fail and if you alone cannot fix it you'll need help.
Hopefully you now have some *realistic* and yet scary figures. You need to figure out what sort of resiliency the network has and what is the likelihood of a total catastrophic failure. The less redundant the setup, the higher the chance.
Bring this information to the relevant people and demonstrate how these risks are lowered with additional headcount/equipment.
If you have more than 5 minutes to think about this I'm sure you'll expand on this line of thought and come up with something even more polished.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
You need to show how much of your time is being spent on stuff is help desk, desktop support and so on. You then need to document your cost that is being spent on these activities each week in terms of salary plus benefits (HR can get this for you, typically 1.5 times salary). You then need to document your opportunity cost for those things that you aren't working on that the business needs (systems that support business functions).
If you can do this than you can show how your company is spending by using programmers as help desk staff. It likely won't take very many hours a week of help desk time to justify paying for a couple help desk staff. The biggest thing is the opportunity cost to the business in terms of what you aren't working on during those hours. If the numbers don't add up than it doesn't justify to hire your staff, if they do than it does.
SCROOGE: Cratchit!
BOB CRATCHIT: Yes, sir? Yes, sir?
SCROOGE: It's too late to have you go to Parthegill's. He'll be closed up for
Christmas like these other fools. We may as well close up the place now.
BOB CRATCHIT: Yes, sir. It IS getting a little dark. Hard to see the figures.
SCROOGE: I - I suppose you'll want the entire day to-morrow?
BOB CRATCHIT: If it's quite convenient, sir.
SCROOGE: It's not convenient -- and it's not fair, either. But I suppose I
can't do anything about it. Heh. If - if I was to stop half-a-crown of your
wages, you'd think yourself very ill-used, I'll be bound?
BOB CRATCHIT: Well, sir, I--
SCROOGE: Yeah, but you don't think me ill-used, when I pay a day's wages for
no work.
BOB CRATCHIT: It's only once a year, sir.
SCROOGE: Once a year! Once a year, indeed. A fine excuse for picking a man's
pocket every twenty-fifth of December! But I suppose there's no good talking.
You must have the whole day. Well, see that you're here all the earlier the
next morning. You understand?
BOB CRATCHIT: Oh, I will, sir.
One thing the CEO must understand is that the amount of IT people is not dependent on how many other employees the company has, but on the IT environment they are running. :-) )
For your size there should be at least 8 people (6 would be fine if you would not run Windows
Also one thing to understand is - every position so crucial that it can stop you from doing business must have at least 1 full backup, no matter the actual workload.
You can explain it in a way every businessman understand - how much money you are going to loose if I (you) get hit by a car and die today.
If the answer is anything else then 0 there is something wrong with your department structure..
we are used to design our server infrastructure, storage and network without a single point of failure, so we do not face such situation. Many companies just forget that you have to design you IT department and people the exact same way.
Your boss's job is to make sure that the company turns a profit. Why should he hire more people when everything is working fine right now? This might *sound* like a stupid question, but that's exactly what your boss is going to ask. You need to have an answer for him.
You say that projects are getting delayed so that you can put out fires. *What* projects? Could these projects save the company money? Could they reduce risk and therefore prevent a loss of money? Are they necessary for the business to continue operating thus make money? For example, you said that IT is getting pressure from other departments because IT is holding them up. There's a good business case for hiring more IT staff. The other department could get their projects going faster and thus make more money.
You also mentioned helpdesk staff. What are your current wait times? Are you tracking them? If so, pull the data. If not, start tracking them now. If wait times are excessive then that's lost money. If hiring helpdesk staff can help other people get back to work faster then the company can make more money.
Back all of this up with numbers. You don't have to have a perfect analysis, but you should have some kind of rough number to give to your boss.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
when you run your numbers don't forget that you may be able to "sell" the increases better if you can make it as cheap as possible.
start with your Help desk do you have a large number of tickets that could be cleared by a "trained monkey"?? Also for the top end folks think "What will happen if i get run over by a bus or go Full Metal Jacket BOFH?"
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
1) Quit and get the outsource contract.
2) Bill them twice what you earn now.
3) ???
4) Profit!
ROI: Return on Investment
I had the displeasure of working inside Walmart stores for four years. (Thankfully, not for them, just in them.) They printed on every one of their distribution packaging boxes at the time, "Collapsing this box and sending it back saves the company $0.11.) Now there's ROI as simple and as plain-as-day.
How much time is lost due to computer or program downtime? How much time is lost due to broken code? How inefficient is having programmers share in tech support duties? How much money is this costing the company? Tell the company what they save by hiring another employee, and they'll make it happen.
Unless you're selling your software, IT departments don't make money. They either save money or increase productivity through automating manual processes allowing the company to fire people or produce more product with the same amount of people. Having an IT department that is larger than 1-2% of the company causes the costs to outweigh the gains. You'll have a hard time making your case unless your company can either monazite the work your IT department does or you can prove there will be very significant savings.
Tons of outsourced helpdesk available these days. We use it to provide 24x7 to our customers that need it.
That was my immediate thought too.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
Every environment is different but I tend to agree with ledow.... Based on what you have stated, I would think your IT dept is sufficient in size.
I work at a 400 user company (wholesale/retail) with an IT staff of 4: a developer, an ERP help desk person, a IT director who also manages the ERP system, and myself, the sys admin who handles everything else. We have 30 branch locations a commercial SAN, about 16 virtual servers and 8 or 9 physical ones.
What helps hugely in my case is that the bulk of my users are on thin clients. I've only got one PC at each remote site and maybe 100 at HQ. Everyone else is using thin clients connecting to our 4 RDS server farm. Even so, that leaves 130 or so windows 7 laptops & desktops but I typically only get a handful of calls a week from people with PC problems. As for my servers, I'm actually shocked at how stable and maintenance free they have been - All Dell & Hyper-V. Server 2008R2/Exchange 2010.
I do all the networking, server & SAN management, and desktop support myself, and I frequently wish I had more big projects because I can get quite bored when things are running smoothly. I'm not even a l33t coding admin. Just a competent old-school point and click one. Also I tend do do things cheaply which, ironically, also reduces complexity (in my case). I stay away from the commercial high end backup, system/network management, or security solutions, most of which are geared to enterprises much larger than ours. I stick to free and/or cheap, and for the most part and it all runs very smoothly. The first few years of setup and clean up were a lot of work but these days my network practically runs itself.
What I don't have is an overbearing management structure with unrealistic expectations and requirements, so that also helps a lot. What I do have is 400 people who generally think I'm the best thing since sliced bread and a lot of free time at work.
This. Do not waste your energy trying to convince a PHB. Rather invest it in finding a better place to work.
Start speaking the boss's language. They don't think in terms of bits and bytes. They don't think in terms of cases reported and entered. They think in terms of bottom line.
Do the following :
1) Establish a business case without using technical terms (jargon in their jargon)
2) Express the cost of hiring the employee in terms of how much the cost of recruiting the employee and providing a workspace for them
3) Express the cost over time that the employee provides.
4) Make an itemized list which expresses how you'll cover and recover the investment of the new employee.
5) Make a power point and use graphics.
6) Schedule a meeting, make your case.
If you use any technical jargon in this meeting that can't be found in a financial or business magazine, you've already lost. Give up and walk away.
Try one man, 1200+ users, 500+ machines, and 8 servers. Public school. Less salary than you can shake a stick at. But I'm passionate about K-12 public education, and I love helping kids. Don't like it? Tell your superintendent why, then walk away.
I think both you and I know that a school environment is not a business environment. A business generally has income dependent on productivity. A school has generally a fixed income dependent on student enrollment. If the submitter can increase productivity by hiring another employee, it's worth money to the company. If a school can increase productivity by hiring another employee, it doesn't mean jack squat.
In terms of your ratios, I have little sympathy. And take your rants out someplace else. It's not productive to the conversation.
You mentioned Exchange. Get rid of it. This is something you don't need to manage. Loose it.
Farm this out. Depending on your Love Hate with Google they do a great job of managing corp email. Make email not your problem.
Are you managing a document respository? If so loose it. Farm this out. Do not settle for some integrated POS.
Are you managing the VM farm? Why? Get rid of it. Go Amazon, Google, Rack Space. You should not be spending more than 10 seconds a day worrying about VM capacity.
OK now you have some people resources back.
PS. Outsourcing your Business IT is a myth. If it is core to your business keep it close to home. If it is managing something silly like email outsource it.
I've seen a few posts dancing about what you should do, which is provide proof, but they don't explicitly say it.
You need to quantify the issue for management. You and your associates should track the hours you spend on IT. If that adds up to 4 hours or more, that's justification for at least a part-timer. The next thing you point to is that you are paid X and a tech guy can be paid Y for the same job, a savings of Z. This is how you demonstrate cost savings to management.
This. Get a new job and leave skidmarks on the floor running out of there. GTFO. I don't know where you're located, but if it's within driving distance of any city of consequence, you can have a new job in a month if not sooner if you've got IT expertise.
I just quit a job like what you describe (in my case, developer on paper, but doing a thousand other things because they wouldn't get done if I left it up to clueless management). Solo developer, no sysadmin, no DBA, no QA, no administrative support, no specs, no clue. The only thing I did wrong was let it go on for as long as it did.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Ok, many people have already picked this one up. But how many full time developers do you need? Your ERP should be upgraded/customised/developed on a project, maybe 3-6 months cycle per year. Unless there is an urgent bug or other issue that stops the business. It seems to us like every little ask by the business is just put into place, instead of driving the business to using the software correctly or at least 4 full developers seems like that's the case. I'd look at create a correct roadmap for the ERP or even look at if it's the correct product. That much development for any company seems excessive unless you were like someone who are totally unique ala NASA. But, assuming all is good with the number of developers, I'd be pushing to look at how the efficiencies would benefit the company in terms of profit? So a business case with the team and your manager, then this needs to be presented to your CEO etc.
Agreed. OH for mod points!
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
That's all well and good if you don't have a co-worker who will go to the CEO and explain how if HE were in charge, the printers would be working.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Or become the management.
Wrong word.
Money.
Show them how they are losing money, or could make more money, and all things become possible.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
And you can feel smug and superior as you're being walked out by security shortly afterwards.
The best way to get management to finance something is to have them think it's their idea.
Never tell them exactly what you want unless they ask specifically, but let them know what the bottlenecks are and how they affect S&M's ability to maximize potential and leverage accountable assets through synergy.
Throw enough leads around that they'll find the solution you want to the perceived bottlenecks. If you have to, contact vendors who'll engage the PHBs without ever mentioning that the idea came from you.
Even if you come up with a plan that increases the black for the company, it is far from certain that management will go for it unless they feel that they came up with it, not you.
And the corollary to this is that if there's something you really do not want to see, and which management hasn't already thought of, suggest it. Because someone else came up with the idea, it won't happen, and they'll go out of their way to ensure that it does not happen.
--
Long time BOFH
For such a small organisation with so few systems you actually do have a rather large IT department. Though 1 admin is always a little to small as you do need someone to back you up as even the best people get sick or need holidays.
I'd agree, but I'd never consolidate 'programmers' into IT. The last thing a 'programmer' needs is to handle help desk shit in the middle of development. And it sounds to me like that is what is hurting...development.
Which begs the question: In your company, What is a programmer? Perhaps they may not be fully vetted software engineers; people who knew a little scripting and decided to take over the software development without the appropriate background or leadership.
Is this a throughput problem or skill set problem?
Do you notice a lot of time being spent on reddit or non-work related chat?
Do you notice more workarounds being implemented in your software than solutions?
There are a ton of questions to be answered, all I see is: We need more people because ours can't do the job.
From the management's perspective...well, they'll just ask a few other companies what the ratio of 'IT' is to company size. And start doing basic math.
Solution: Continuing education....on your own time.
The key is not meeting your SLA's and showing them why it's staff related... The old days of over inflating staff numbers so you're ready for any emergency is over in this day and age of cost cutting to keep profits up or costs down. Basically, people like you deserve better, and will never get it (hope I'm wrong there) because we're the real deal and not just lazy hack that doesn't give a crap about what their job entails. Most of my underlings won't do anything coming even close to troubleshooting at home since they do that at work, kind of a race car driver not driving his own home car....you get the picture.
End of Line.
Two things; Never go to management with a problem, go with a solution
If I'm not mistaken, he went to them with a solution: hire one more guy. And they would make money out of it by allowing the company to continue doing business because it wouldn't fall like a house of cards. Ergo, your conditions are fulfilled.
Ezekiel 23:20
Well, not really.
Provide a business case showing that if you get hurt or killed, there is will be a serious impact to the business and continuity. Also show how you can only fix one major issue at a time so any major issue will be a serious impact to the business. Remember to show you are close to irreplaceable and effectively a single point of failure which could endanger the company's revenue and good will with customers and vendors.
Also, as most executives see IT as a cost center, include information on how what you support improves efficiency and sales, especially via internet connectivity and email, and thus improves profits.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
The first thing is to remind them that you could be hit by a bus or win the powerball tomorrow and they need to have at least one more person who knows your job in order to stay in business.
Keep it in terms that they will see as practical.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
fine, let him.. He'll quickly find out that no-one likes a whiner.
You are making the very large and probably false assumption that the submitter has the authority to make those decisions. Also, there may be an unintended side effect of pushing for such changes: the submitter could end up slitting his own throat by indicating that he is not important and all his job duties can be outsourced.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Look to your headcount: 150 employees / 1 IT Support. That is really nothing. My last headcount was 450/1. You CEO to give you 1 more IT Support would have to cut a Programmer. What you need is good processes to help you on your daily task. Ask for an ITIL course, for you *and* your IT Manager, commit to using it's best practices (your CEO will have to back this up) and it will make things better. You can stack a lot of IT Personnel, sure, or you can do more, using good practices.
You don't. You tell the people asking you for stuff that you don't have the resources to do it, and you let them convince your boss that you need more people.
Stop trying to do everything, prioritise the important stuff, say no to everything else, and if the things you say no to are important enough, they'll find the manpower.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Ask them which of the things they need implemented now is a greater priority and let them figure out the resourcing themselves.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
no.
just label 4 of the guys as part of the factory production team. that's what they are.
Yeah, this is the problem.
Programmers, while from a layman's point of view are "IT", they are not helping to complete to the IT work load. They may help build the business processes, but they aren't pulling cables or tracking down DNS issues. So as far as what they do in IT, it's "zero".
Submitter's description outlines ONE "IT person" in the organization. (him / her)
I would approach this with a two step process; first, get a ticketing system and get all desktop support on it. That will let you show the programmers don't do shit for it, and what the work load is.
THAT sets you up to add other tasks the programmers, the manager, and the subby do on the ticketing, and when the workload is high, just say "sorry, can't do that doing this" and it's all documented.
Then you just do what is important, mark off your hours of the day, and go home. When the shit stays broken and people get pissed about it, they go "why?" and they will see the answer is "not enough people for this." If it's YOUR idea, they won't do it. If it's THEIR idea, they will.
I assume the subby doesn't want to be the person to do the desktop support. So from there, you hire a local goon for a day / evening per week, or a local firm, or some place in India, or whatever. THEY work on the ticket backlog of desktop issues.
Also, you may find that when people have to articulate what is wrong, their problems suddenly go away. People who get help with computers are VERY VERY LAZY and will not learn something. Suddenly rebooting the computer will seem worthwhile compared to (ugh!) writing clear English. Lastly, you can find out which few people are causing the most problems and have evidence to get them to change their ways (or at least stop screwing up their computers). You know, that one guy that always gets the virus of the day (always the same guy, always "i don't know what happened!"), and that one person who's keyboard, monitor, mouse, or whatever needs replacing just because (as a status symbol).
If I'm not mistaken, he went to them with a solution: hire one more guy.
That's not a solution because it didn't come with a Return On Investment analysis attached detailing the financial cost to the company and the expected return from the investment. I'm an engineer and I'm also a certified accountant. I went back to school to learn finance precisely because I didn't know how to make an economic argument for the resources I needed. If you want to make a case for an expenditure you need to justify it in dollar terms whenever possible. In this case the justification is in opportunity cost and productivity. You show how much the lack of a person is costing the company in lost productivity and what the return on investment and timeframe for that return might be.
change the priority to the other projects
Setting priorities is a manager's job, it's your job to keep a list of the jobs your manager has given you and periodically remind them they can use more than one priority number. If there's no response then your're free to pick the jobs that interest you the most. When you busy, it's easy to forget that having a long list of shit to do is always preferable to the opposite situation.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I'm wondering why more bodies are needed?
A manufacturing company with that many custom apps already, surely they aren't developing new/additional apps. What do you manufacture, computer chips or stamped metal parts? What are the 4 developers doing? Are they fully utilized or are they less and less busy as they slide into maintenance mode and kill bugs?
A five man IT department for a 130 desktop company does seem heavy, but acceptable to me. A single administrator is a disaster waiting to happen and you can force this issue by simply taking two weeks off and turning off your phone.
Unless you can tell me some reason why my above assumptions are off base, the solution to this problem seems to be cross training. One or more developers needs to also be an administrator and if they can't learn the job adequately, one of the developers needs to be replaced.
Based on what you've said so far, I'd be very reluctant to taking on another body(salary, taxes, healthcare, pension/401k). Give me a good reason. If you're just tired, we can fix that internally.
My first recommendation is to calculate your cost of downtime due to a failed hardware or software component you control. In some manufacturing environments even an extra hour (if your out of the office and need to drive in) could pay a $25k salary for a year.
Next is to focus on getting a dedicated resource for intake of calls/emails and to handle most of the running around. The first 2 years someone is out of school they are most willing to work for really cheap. Introduce yourself to some teachers at the local community college or trade schools and even see about getting some students during their on the job training to show the improved response time to incoming requests without actually costing the company money.
Once management gets better service, losing it might just make them more willing to pay to get it back.
You're pretty funny. It's managements job to set the bar so you can "Barely keep up" That's how they extract the most work out of you. If you're stressed out and barely able to keep up, then YOU are the problem. Stop trying so hard. Back the F up. Prioritize your projects, put in your 40 to 50 hrs and go home. If they don't like it they can fire you and retrain someone else. Or maybe they will get you some help.
The fact of the matter is, if you're over-worked and ok with that, they have no business reason to get you help. You are never going to "Talk them into it" because, to be frank, that's not your job. There may be financial reasons they can't hire anyone else, they might be incompetent. Who knows. If you aren't ok with how things are, change what you can. Mostly likely the only changes you can make are in your own behavior and attitude. If that doesn't help, or they get pissed, it's time to move on. There are those in the company that make strategic decisions. You are not one of those people, get over it. You're like the guy at the back of the buss complaining about how the drivers operating it. Don't complain, just get off.
We outsource our helpdesk to a (US BASED!!!) company that charges a very reasonable per incident fee. They are extremely professional and will do pretty much anything we train them to do and provide documentation for. I've been EXTREMELY happy with them. We use them to provide after hours support, in lieu of me having to staff people at night. I'm not going to post the name of the company here unless you specifically ask, because they don't pay me.
As someone who works in management, I couldn't agree more. Don't come with a problem, come with a solution. I don't pay my staff to find problems I pay them to find problems and FIX THEM.
http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/000000/00000/1000/200/1248/1248.strip.gif
Like everyone else is saying, you need to justify it in dollars as well as sense in detail. But when you present the case, frame it so that they can take the credit for doing it (yes, I'm serious). You both win.
Error reading device 'Signature'. (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?
I've watched a yes man given a shot because he judged correctly or got lucky and told the CEO exactly what he wanted to hear. It didn't end well, but it got them 6 months in a position that he wouldn't have had if the other managers weren't playing little emperor games themselves.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Four other programmers, yes. If you seriously think that being a programmer means that you're automatically qualified to be a network/systems administrator then you might have forgotten to take your pills this morning.
I agree. Here's my company's situation - mfg environment, sounds very similar to OP's:
80 employees, 40 desktops, 7 physical servers, 3 virtual servers + a commercial SAN. We're a Windows shop with Exchange 2007. In-house ERP - not as many (15?) customizations, but we have about 20 custom apps that integrate with ERP as well.
One lone wolf in IT.
Start logging the time doing help desk duties for each employees.
Build a correlation between the delays in project and help desk duties.
Show the time it takes to fix help desk issues and put a dollar amount to it, you might need it later, especially if you keep tracking, you will be able to show improvements and that will be your cyber money !
IT is soft savings and expenses, you have to see it that way and present it as a potential savings tool by demonstrating the impact of those soft savings to other department who are making money. Show the variation in expenses and profits that your group generates.
If you do this right, you won't have to ask for people, they will impose them on you.
If he doesn't have the power to decide he can certainly tell the bosses. The goal is more resources. The author is looking for methods of telling the boss they need more help.
Well how about something novel. How about giving the boss the problem and a solution. Not just a problem statement.
I need more people -- Problem
Here is how I can free up some people -- Solution.
The people that come to me with only step one should worry about their jobs.
This is the best answer. I propose the topic to be closed right now.
I don't have a sig.
Here, we have 1,200 devices, 35-40-ish virtual servers, across 6 public schools, with 1 manager, 2 techs, and a secretary to run it.
I think of it as job security.
When the CEO comes in and rambles about printers not working - then let him choose between printer and a penalty for not meeting deadline for project X.
What I've learned in my years in IT (about 12 total, 10 of those as an IT manager) is that you never go to a manager with only a problem. You go in with a problem and at least 3 well thought-out solutions. Waiting until some other shit hits the fan will only put you in a bad light and will show you are passive aggressive. Instead, give him your own hard numbers. Document the troubles and impacts, tell him how much of each persons average work week is spent on help desk calls and how late that made some big project X. Tell him how much time your programmers are spending helping other tasks. Then tell him how much time you put in in an average work week, and how much you would need to get everything done (i.e. if you're working over 50, that's grounds for 1/4 person. If instead you need over 50 to get the job done on time, ditto).
As a manager, it's your job to take care of your folks. Have a meeting with them and get their hard numbers, %time doing things, how late they anticipate things being, how many hours they work, etc... Then go in to the boss and tell him those facts and three possible solutions (for example): 1) We need X more bodies to do this and that. 2) We focus on the big projects and let help desk issues slip and miss deadlines or 3) We miss out on deadlines and opportunities because we have N hours per week dedicated to help desk work, when we should have Y.
I work in the Managed Service Provider industry. We see your exact problem all the time. Usually it is when "you" have quit and rather than replace you with a single body, they replace you with us. An actual IT staff with help desk, network admins etc and we do it for generally less than the cost of "you". I will never go into a business and recommend replacement of a local IT resource but when they leave I will give them a 100 reasons why they should not replace you with another you. In your case the programmers would stay but the network admin would be gone. I would place a value on that contract between $65k and $80k per year for us to support it. Be careful what you ask for because the company may get just what they need... only you won't be there.
I work in IT for a US based Fortune 500 company. I am internal support but sometimes I have to talk to customers when they issues related to one specific product I support. I deal with your type of company all the time. Too much actually. When you have to ask here how to convince the top dog that ONE person is insufficient for a company your size, the war is over before you began and you have lost. Even if by some miracle you do convince the CEO to hire one more guy, I can promise you that your CEO places zero value on your work and it's just a matter of time before you are looking for another job anyway. If your CEO valued your work or was smart enough to at least somewhat understand it, he would already have thought of the "What if I get hit by a bus?" scenario and would long ago have gotten a backup to work with you and learn the job. You'll either be outsourced (yes, your CEO may be stupid enough to try that) or replaced by some work visa holder who will be half the worker you are but he'll work for half the money you get too. You're done here, buddy. If your company placed any value on its IT staff, you would already have the help you need. Let me guess this too because I've seen this too many times as well - you love (well, you did when you started at least) working for a smaller company because they have made you some pie in the sky promises about future stock options (they probably won't pan out) and you have nothing good to say about large companies because you can't take the bureaucracy. Honestly, most small companies aren't all that great to work for. Some are for sure. But I see your type of company all the time in my work because we sell our software to companies like yours. The odds are about 90% that things are never going to get better or that if you do get another person and your company grows, two of you won't be enough to handle the growth and you won't get a third person.
My shop is about the same size as yours, with slightly more users as well as boxes to support and there are 3 of us including the CIO.
Not one of us specialize, we are all adaptable. Part of being in IT is the ability to problem solve and expand your skill set so you don't become legacy.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
It all depends on what is being done and what is happening doesn't it? If there is little change or need for change then less people are needed than if requirements are changing.
The last time I was in an MS environment a lot of things were happening (crashes etc, migrating to new versions of software and antivirus software losing an arms race) so a lot of people were required. Now less are required, but have a new requirement (migrate everyone to win8 or whatever) and suddenly you need more people until it all settles down.
If you have zero understanding of how a computer operates and what it takes to maintain that, you have zero qualifications to program.
This is part of the problem with programs written today. The core understanding it took years ago to self optimize your code went the way of the dodo. I do understand that with modern compilers most of that is done for you, but it is still no excuse for working on a piece of technology and only knowing how to make X happen. That's a bit like someone working in a bookstore but not knowing how to read.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
In actuality 5 people is a very large IT department for an organisation your size. The problem is that you don't actually have 5 people in your IT department. You have 4 people doing LoB development and you doing IT.
It's a classic mistake one my employer also makes but Developers are not, properly speaking, part of the IT department. You hire them for a different reason, you expect different skill sets, and the high interrupt nature of regular support work basically kills their productivity. Claiming they're part of the IT department is like saying that Finance is IT because they're pretty good with excel.
Now the reality may be that when you take all the support crap they're not properly qualified to do away from the developers that you actually find out you need fewer of them, but that's a completely separate issue.
How about giving the boss the problem and a solution.
Because it is the boss' job to come up with a solution to this kind of problem.
If you worked for me as a manager of people, YOU should worry about YOUR job because as a manager (boss) it is your job to solve that kind of problem. By saying it is your employee's job to come up with a solution to a management problem, you are saying you are lazy and expendable. I should fire YOU and promote HIM.
The goal is more resources. The author is looking for methods of telling the boss they need more help.
And, your suggestion is to tell them how they can outsource most of his job thus making him redundant.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Suck it up Nancy! It's called the economic environment we live in. Personally I like it. It has gotten rid of the useless IT professionals that thought they could just draw a good paycheck so they got into the field. It's not for the faint of heart. The people that are good at what they do can more then handle the environment you describe. My last job I had triple the environment you described and I handled it myself.
IT is a cost center. We IT people correctly see it as a "strategic cost center" but most CEOs and accounting/finance folks see it as a generic cost center. The age old quest of the finance/accounting people is to reduce cost centers. You need to articulate to your boss the micro-economic factors of how overall costs are actually increased by skimping on IT spending. Identify specific instances as a case study. Also point out how near term projects will save near term costs. Assume the CEO will be obtuse no matter what you say. The popular CEO counter nowadays is people just need to "multitask" more. However multitasking is never a solution and always decreases productivity (it is "specialization of labor" which increases productivity).
...would be with analogy. Upper management don't do everything themselves. They have staff they delegate to. Get them to stop and think what a nightmare they'd be in if they had nobody to delegate to, and had to do all of the work coming at them by themselves. It's the same for IT.
If they try to go "But those other 5 guys..." stop them and point out that that would be like giving them 5 janitors to delegate to. They'd be better than nothing, but not the right fit for the job and a lot still wouldn't get done.
If you can't make a solid business case, you're wasting your time. Present a solid business case which shows a cost/benefit analysis. If the numbers don't make sense, you'll be out of luck.
"Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup."
You're doing it wrong. With 150 employees you should not need 5 IT staff even, let alone more after that. Fix what you're doing wrong (to me, it sounds like you're micromanaging everyone's machines, and wasting a whole bunch of time in doing it).
Could work but could get you fired as well but: crash 2 servers. Fix 1 server. Boss goes to see you to tell you when its going to be fixed. Tell him not know and it will take time. BUT..hire another 1 now and you'll have it pronto...
There's your other staff
What exactly is it that you do then?
The best thing is always to have users with technical skills in the business. IT is wasteful spending when it's in a silo. That being said, there are places for IT - like SOx permissions, shared infrastructure maintenance/config, other...
What a second, according to the benevolent corporations and their supporters, H-1Bs make the same amount of money as citizens and are more competent, that's why they were hired in the first place! The H-1B system could never be abused in such a fashion! For shame, sir!
Resign. That's what I did. Now I don't have a job, but my ex-employer hired two people to replace me so it kinda worked out.
The problem is, the problem is often the management. And while they can be fixed, it's very time consuming.
Too many words, not enough numbers.
Have a backlog, so you can prove what isn't getting done. And it is a list of what the newbie would do, tomorrow. When priorities change, record that.
Basically everything in the summary needs to have backing data, or it fails. Most every other recommendation will create animosity, so even if you win you lose. Prepare for questions like, out of that backlog, how many will never get done, or are no longer needed?
When the CEO comes in and rambles about printers not working - then let him choose between printer and a penalty for not meeting deadline for project X.
What I've learned in my years in IT (about 12 total, 10 of those as an IT manager) is that you never go to a manager with only a problem. You go in with a problem and at least 3 well thought-out solutions. Waiting until some other shit hits the fan will only put you in a bad light and will show you are passive aggressive. Instead, give him your own hard numbers. Document the troubles and impacts, tell him how much of each persons average work week is spent on help desk calls and how late that made some big project X. Tell him how much time your programmers are spending helping other tasks. Then tell him how much time you put in in an average work week, and how much you would need to get everything done (i.e. if you're working over 50, that's grounds for 1/4 person. If instead you need over 50 to get the job done on time, ditto).
As a manager, it's your job to take care of your folks. Have a meeting with them and get their hard numbers, %time doing things, how late they anticipate things being, how many hours they work, etc... Then go in to the boss and tell him those facts and three possible solutions (for example): 1) We need X more bodies to do this and that. 2) We focus on the big projects and let help desk issues slip and miss deadlines or 3) We miss out on deadlines and opportunities because we have N hours per week dedicated to help desk work, when we should have Y.
Not contradicting you but making a tangential point. The main problem with your line of thinking is that you still think like an "IT Manager" or any first line manager. I've seen that in many cases, it is worthwhile to think like an entrepreneur instead.
The main problem is that IT has become perceived as a background problem or a fixed cost. Like electricity or water supply. We're nothing but glorified plumbers as far as senior management is concerned.
You cannot fix this by presenting an IT Manager type solution. They would perceive it the same way you would if your plumber told you about the three different ways he would solve your basement leak problem. While you would be interested in getting it fixed and getting it fixed "right" in a reasonable price, you really don't give a crap for the details or even how it gets done and with how many people.
You fix this by changing their mentality. Get them to believe that IT doesn't come for free (as a fixed cost on the balance sheet), and is not a cost center. Get them to believe that IT is really a "pay as you go" kind of service or capability. Get them to believe that IT is a profit center in itself. That it is an independent entity.
Infosys or IBM or Accenture is your competition. So treat them as such instead of just bitching about them in general (you didn't say that, just saying in general). You need to either match their cost or need to differentiate yourself (and your IT team) as a crack high quality and super reliable team.
I admit this stuff is easy to say, and much harder to do. But this is how it should be done, IMHO.
You know, the more I think about this, the more I realize that the real skill a good IT or software manager needs, at least in these types of roles, is really a good understanding of how finance works in an organization. Stuff like charge-back, reconciliation. I mean, if we were an independent contractor team handling a company's IT, this is exactly what we would be concerned with. Work is fine, but we and our organization needs to get paid correctly and on time.
I'm only talking about organizations where IT is a sub-organization. Of course, in pure IT shops or software development or software product shops, the dev team IS the profit center. So the point becomes moot.
Given the current stories about how little pilots do on the flight deck, I think one can argue that they SHOULD be handing out food, especially on some of the longer haul flights :)
Better yet, get a new job but keep in touch with your current management. Seeing how better you are doing, and how under handed they are will get them to make a wise decision. It's like teasing your old girlfriend with the new girl, but totally works.
Quit and leave abruptly.
Find another job first.
IT is not a part of the business model -- you most likely don't.
You're considered a necessary but unwanted expense like keeping the lights on and are usually treated like the janitor.
No one cares who you are or what you are doing until there is a mess somewhere. Then it is your fault for not having cleaned it up already.
Welcome to IT.
If I had known years ago what I was getting myself into I would never have gotten into this industry or at least I would have had the sense to work in a business where IT *is* the business. Hopefully I will be able to make that transition in the future.
I agree entirely. What people call a programmer today is merely a job title, not a profession. You are hired as a programmer. That doesn't mean you're good at it, or that you even have training in it. That's just what they call you when you walk in the door, and what they put on your business card.
I work at an institution with about 20 "Programmers". They can barely string together coherent lines of the proprietary BASIC-like language they use for the information system. The web development team uses ColdFusion, and is 3 or 4 major versions behind (MX 7, IIRC?) on their upgrade because every time they think about upgrading, someone gets cold feet. I've even heard a System Engineer (HR for systems administrator) state, in an entirely serious e-mail, that "our institution doesn't support Curl", because we're running an old as hell AIX system, that they have no development server for, and refuse to compile and test packages for it. Not a single one of those brats can write a line of Perl, Python or even any shell either, so we have a vendor on one hand saying "upload data X to Y" and them saying "we can't". They have absolutely no problem solving ability at all, and I'm ashamed to be in the same generally industry as them.
What's worse, is we've worked with a few pretty large vendors recently (our information system vendors, and two CMS vendors), and their code has either been terrible, or has a really really strong, overprotective, IDE smell (where chunks of library code look strangely more uniform than the rest, and take 15 lines to do 1 line of work). One of them actually asked me why one of my randomly generated passwords was "so long". Was he typing it by hand?
I'm also ashamed of my horrendous typos. :p
This is the one thing I have always hated about reality.
One experience comes to mind; A new project comes up, I tell my boss that "it is impossible to do it that fast." His response "we will need to manage it tightly then."
I mean WTF?
Similar, job interview; "how long will it take you?" "3 weeks" "we need it done in 2. Joe says he can do it in 2, so we hired Joe" 6 weeks later the jobs gets finished and Joe is awarded a raise because he has a "positive attitude"
Fuck Joe, he lied at the start and he knew it. Joe is being rewarded for his attitude and not his skill. I wouldn't want to work for that company anyhow. (side story, that boss was convicted of embezzlement 6 months later)
So, yeah anyhow, 2 observations; Every situation is unique, but you have 20 written applications, it sure should not take 4 programmers to maintain them, unless they are crap to begin with, if so that is part of the problem. I can see 130 desktops+servers keeping one guy busy, sounds like someone should have free time to be of assistance, dedicated help desk for a time, at a minimum. Work smart, don't cause your own workload, ie by buying cheap hardware that has to be maintained all the time. That is a case where basic analysis skills will verify or refute a real problem.
If it is really as bad as you say, first post wins; quit.
Sadly, and reality; if you can't find another job, you are probably part of the problem.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
And all of this will be followed by the CEO/Director/Manager saying
"Gartner says we should only need one admin per 500 servers and 10,000 network ports."
I have been told this over and over, while trying to manage over 300 one off 10 year old servers, putting in 90 hours weeks, and running 250+ tickets in queue. The same CEO/Director/Manager then complains that you are not doing your job because you have 250+ ticket in queue.
Turned out the best solution was to find another job and quit.
Spend a week, and convince the others to follow suit: Document, down to quarter hours, how much time you spend doing your job, and how much is spent on help desk work. Then suggest what management is paying for a sysadmin or programmer to do help desk work.
The costs alone will push them, esp. if any or all of you are doing overtime frequently.
Add one more argument: what happens if one of you gets hit by a car, or the flu, or finds another job - how's the slack going to be picked up? Long time ago - I was working in a mainframe shop back then - the systems programmer went on vacation for a week. Tuesday of that week, they found him on the beach, and had him come back to fix a problem. A month later, one of the operators got promoted to assistant, and started training. Being irreplacable means never having a life of your own.
mark
What exactly is it that you do then?
This is it exactly. You're a manager, jon3k. You don't pay your staff anything. The company does that. You know this because if you leave, they'll still get paid.
You're supposed to be MANAGING your personnel. If you see a problem with the personnel under your management, YOU'RE supposed to be the one coming up with the solution. The problem described is a personnel problem, not an IT problem. IT staff are paid to find, fix, and prevent IT problems, not personnel problems. Managers are paid to find, fix, and prevent personnel problems. If they're not doing that, then they're not doing their jobs as managers.
Q: How do I convince management to hire more IT staff?
A: Quit.
Fail!
Let me explain how this works in management-land.
"We're not going to back fill."
A good manager will take the raise and accolades for cutting costs. And then leave for greener pastures while the references are still positive.
It's all Win-Win. The company saves money, the manager gets a raise and a better job. Everyone wins.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
I don't know all the details, but this reads like you aren't correctly identifying who is IT.
When your printer breaks, or you need a new computer installed, you call IT.
When you work at a manufacturing plant and you need software for the machines, that's not IT. That's development. It sounds to me like you have an IT department of one person (you) and that your development team is helping out with IT. "Projects with deadlines" is not usually a phrase you hear from IT unless it's a project like upgrading everyone's software. It sounds to me like you are letting management downplay your contribution with incorrect job titles.
The day to day problems aren't "often in management". Most problems are simple technical problems that have zero to do with management. I realize Dilbert taught us all that bosses are bad and everything is their fault, but it's just not true. I've got a boss too, I don't blame everything on him either.
Here is the never ending issue: 1. You in the swamp up to your butt in alligators. 2. Manager telling his boss everything is great. 3. His boss telling the CEO all is well. So......you are going to have to convince the 2 layers above you to tell the CEO that they have been totally wrong for a long time and the CEO is going to trash his golf buddies for some peon he hardly knows and views as a replaceable widget anyway.
First: a compiler is better at optimizing than you are. Don't try to fight it.
Second: if you understand how x86 is implemented in a modern CPU nobody that wants a programmer can afford you. You have a rudimentary (and probably outdated) understanding about what a computer is doing. Knowing how computers worked in the past doesn't make you a good programmer. Experience, passion and skill make you a good programmer.
Programmers have always been bad. Everyone knows that. Otherwise maintaining legacy code bases would be an awesome job.
It does no good to whine to your manager about being short-staffed/overloaded/burned out. You need to provide evidence...metrics in other words...to support your case.
Think you've got too many IT helpdesk cases open? Fine. Start tracking how long it takes between the time the case is reported until it gets resolved. If you don't have some sort of automated system to track help desk tickets then chances are that it's getting buried in email messages. Let's say that the average time to close is 8 hours.
Now you've got something concrete that you manager can understand:
1) We need a system to properly track help desk tickets and somewhere to put the solutions so that we're not reinventing the wheel every time an issue comes up. Do a little research on what's out there and make some recommendations.
2) You've established that it takes 8 hours to close a ticket. Is that level of lost productivity acceptable to your manager? What are the impacts? What can be done from an organizational standpoint to improve response times?
As others have mentioned, don't go to your boss with problems. Go with solutions to problems. Help your boss to decide which is the best solution and why. Then go out and implement it and come back later and show him/her the results. Having measurable improvements will make your boss look good to his boss. And it will make you look good to your boss.
It's all about building a case for what you want. If you just go and say "we need more people" the answer will probably be no. But if you identify the problem and come equipped with some potential solutions you have a much better chance of success.
Keep in mind that sometimes just adding more people will not solve the problem. It can even make it worse. Start by taking a look at the process and see if you can find a better way to do things. Would it help, for example, to ditch Exchange and go with Google Apps for your email and scheduling? That's one less thing to manage and it allows you more time to work on other tasks.
My last shop had twice as many desktops, four times as many servers, and less staff. Your problem, it seems to me, is that your ratio of programmers to IT staff is completely skewed. In other words, you're doing way too much "custom" work. Turn a programmer or two into IT staff (if not the physical person, then the position) and you should have sufficient staff for support.
Of course your programmers won't like that and your IT Manager, being a programmer, won't like that, but the fact is your programmers have created a fiefdom that never should have existed in the first place. It's like a tumor that has infiltrated the brain, hard to remove. For such a small company to create so much custom work is really absurd. You're not that "special."
What you REALLY need is a new CEO who understands the nature of the problem and cleans house.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
What's particularly funny about this one is Ashok fitting the role like a jigsaw
If you dont want to go so far as to quit, do something you are entitled to do... Take your whole vacation at once. And tell them you wont be reachable. Dont take your phone or laptop with you. Usually when there is no backup IT guy and you are gone for 2 weeks, Management should wake up to the idea there should always be a backup for when you are away.
Basically what I mean is that your company sounds like my company. Management has gotten away with doing everything half assed because "Hey we can dump this on software engineering and it's free!" So we basically do tech support for the rest of the company, drop things to take care of customer issues, manage servers, not to say managing releases as well. All this doesn't actually work that well but since we've been effectively shielding management from all their stupid incompetent decisions they aren't forced to do anything. So in the end until the shit hits the fan they're going to continue to be stupid. Admittedly you might get fired if you make them feel the results of their decisions. (I think one of the reasons they fired my manager was that he gave a lot of push back and tried to get them to understand how idiotic they were at times. But they didn't want to listen and just axed him and continued with the stupidity.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
They will be able to convince the management of where costs are going and asses your current needs. You will likely get the resources you need and likely keep your job.
If you take your problem to management, you need to haul along with it the solution for that problem, and the justification.
The key to this sentence, is the justification.
You need to show, likely with dollars and cents, how much productivity is being lost because the current staff is being pulled away to deal with general IT issues. Lost productivity for the end user. Lost productivity for you, which in turn means delays and more lost productivity of other projects.
Bringing in your solution (additional staff), will keep you productive with your main focus. It will get quicker responses for general users thereby boosting their productivity, and so on and so forth.
In business, it's all about the bottom line in many respects. Something that costs you X to implement, but makes you 2X or 3X or 4X in return is an easy decision to make from the business perspective.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
Being a programmer suggests skills like:
Software design and architecture
Coding in various languages
Understanding scripting
Understanding hardware to the extent you need to interface with it an design well (which, if you work in UI for instance, isn't a whole heck of a lot)
Knowing a lot of toolsets related to programming: languages, deployment tools, code debuggers, maybe a bit about debugging IP if you do networked apps, IDEs, compilers, IDLs, maybe ability to read a core, etc.
This is not exactly the IP network manager's issues nor the manager of productivity and enterprise software and backup solutions set of skills.
Those would linclude:
a) Understanding repositories (email alone is its own huge beast software wise with lots of idioscyncratic stuff) - this could include administering your companies source repositories and recovering ones that crash, something devs don't often have to deal with
b) Understanding RAIDs, Clouds, and other backup hardware and software (again, its own beast)
c) Understanding scripting (okay, one commonality)
d) Understanding all sorts of admin tools for users, accounts, security policy, etc. across multiple OSes and platforms (not something the average developer has to know, certainly not from the perspective of a manager)
e) Understanding network capacity planning, troubleshooting, network monitoring and troubleshooting toolsets, and everything there is to know about wired and wireless LANs, WAN access tech, routers, hubs, switches, firewalls, gateways, and so on
f) Understanding all the office and productivity software your users use or might need to plan for future needs
g) Understanding all of the legal and internal policy limitations which affect anything to do with data retention, employee dismissal, privacy, etc. as it pertains to IT activity
h) Help desk ops - knowing everything about all of your customers diverse platforms and OSes from an operational point of view and to support all development operations and enterprise activities
The skill sets can overlap in places (more if your programmer has to work on multiple platforms, works closer to hardware or the network, or the like) but it is distinct. No IT manager I know can ever keep up with the full width and breadth of deployed environments. They all play to black gods that when they have to patch a SAN or rebuild an email store, that it comes up okay. They all have higher stress, in any busy environment, than most developers. (I say that as a developer with two decades of experience in military, large corporation, multi-tiered, networked, sometimes massively multi-user systems for possibly tens or hundreds of thousands of users or 7 million as the last 3G/LTE policy software I worked on was supporting....)
I wouldn't trade my job, no matter how bad the day (like the day, 6 months out of school, I was in an RCMP command center when the dispatch system and mobile computing systems crashed, and the dispatchers were trying to figure out where everyone was and if it was possible to land ERT in a school parking lot due to autofire in a public park.... and I had to get the entire system back up ASAP), for the average job of an IT manager.
IT managers are always treated as overhead. Thus nobody wants to pay for them or give the support to ensure a robust infrastructure.
Two questions I'd propose for execs:
A) What is your cost if key industrial data is lost and irrecoverable because the IT budget isn't sufficient to protect it?
B) What is your cost per day if key manufacturing ops are suspended due to an IT system failure again due to insufficient investment?
These can be catastrophic. I've seen companies who've lost datastores (hardware failure, corruption, backups that had never been tested because nobody every wants to buy a system to unpack bacukups on or to spend the time and money to verify them) of code actually have to rewrite multi-month projects. That can be tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, not to mention contractual
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
I am having to deal with this more and more these days. The solution is pretty simple, but it will take some time for you to see results.
The reality is that things are running and the business is functioning. Unless it looks like the business is going to stop functioning, you are not going to get any additional staff.
You have to build the business case for additional staff. Make a PowerPoint. I know it's lame, but it is all management understands.
Start the business case by first quantifying what is being done (basically the summary that you gave us). You detail how much time is being spent keeping things running. This is the Current State.
Then you have to quantify the additional projects in the pipeline. Just lay them out there. Do not judge them, just put it out there in black and white so that management understands exactly what is on your plate. This is the Future State.
THIS IS THE IMPORTANT PART -
You have to detail the risks of not hiring additional staff. Be honest, but not alarmist (unless you are 100% certain that what you are warning about will come true.) You have to lay it out to management that unless they do what you want (hire more staff), there will be consequences (the risks). It is then on them to decide whether or not they want to accept the potential consequences. These are the Risks.
There are two types of risks. There are risks to the future state, and there are risks to the current state. Depending on how dire you present the risks and the reality of them happening will shape the discussion.
The way they respond to an honest accounting of their risks will tell you all you need to know about your employers. If they take you seriously, they will either scale back the workload, or hire additional people. If they blow you off, you know nothing is going to change. It sucks, but at least you will have both eyes wide open.
You might not be the best person to present the business case. If not, partner with someone more senior who is in a position to have a frank discussion with senior management. Make sure that they are aligned with what you are trying to accomplish, otherwise they will undercut you.
For 150 user company, they ideally should hire an external IT Consultant.
I come to Slashdot only to read sigs. One you are reading is mine.
Sadly, yes.. There are *lots* of programmers, who once ran a web server at their house to test with, who are confident that they are fully qualified to do the roles of sysadmin and netadmin. They're more than happy to throw you under the bus and accept 75% of your old salary to do the job.
How hard could those jobs really be? He kept the test box up 24/7 because he invested $100 on a UPS. His "network infrastructure" (cable modem with 1 "server" and two workstations) was flawless, except for when it went down.
They always think it scales out easily. 300 desks? No problem, that's just 300 wires from a Linksys/DLink/Netgear switch, right? Need more? We'll run down to TigerDirect/BestBuy/etc and get another 8 port switch.
It will all go smooth, til they have 300 people screaming that they can't reach the file server; or they can't print; or their email is slow; or Internet access is slow. But there's always a solution to that too. Hire a consultant!
I'm sure plenty of people here have seen exactly this. I've shown up on so many sites, where this was the situation. 5 to 8 port switches in all kinds of weird places. Some under desks. Some inside the drop ceiling with rat shit, and cat5 cables gnawed on by said rats. Some desktops having network problems because their network cable is laid over the carpet, covered by duct tape, in a high traffic area, And even desktops they couldn't figure out how to run cables to so they have USB wifi dongles on them, even though they're on the edge of coverage for that consumer grade AP on top of a file cabinet. Well, on top, if you're lucky. I've seen them under desks, with concrete walls between the AP and the user. Some of those were done by the $200/hr consultant that the boss likes because it's a "nice guy"
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Sometimes I wish I kept notes on some of the insanities at places I've worked and consulted for. Most of the time I'm happy I didn't, because it means I have no liability when someone comes up with a wild-ass lawsuit. I've been subpoenaed for all of my records relating to places I hadn't been to or people I hadn't talked to in years. I prefer the answer "Sorry, all records were left with that employer when I left."
I've seen the curl on AIX thing. Well, not curl specifically, but they couldn't figure out how to update, because "AIX is different". They don't realize, you can put all the regular build tools on there (gcc and friends), and compile just about anything. Well, assuming there isn't an IBM pack for it. I'd be willing to bet there is. It may require upgrading a bunch of TLs. Oh my gosh, we can't upgrade anything, it's been running AIX 4.3.0 since 1997. What if it breaks something?
For those who don't know, "AIX Toolbox for Linux Applications" has worked since 3.0.5.20, so sometime around 1990.
The AIX boxes I worked with, I ended up building my GNU tools, and kept them in ~/bin , because (oh my gosh) we can't have unauthorized binaries in common locations.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I'm sure you already knew this, but...
Curl is available back to at least AIX 4.3, directly from IBM.
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/software/aix/linux/toolbox/alpha.html
I'm sure the simple search, or knowing the (horrible) IBM AIX site, was beyond their skill level.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I'm not an IT person, but I'd suggest, before you go to management, you optimize the department.
You mention that you are taking on projects you don't have a chance to even start. Also you talk about mundane tasks preventing you from working on other projects. You should make sure that, given your current resources, you are working on the right tasks. Start saying no to the least important things. Only take on tasks that you know you can complete. If what you say is true then thats already a big improvement.
Think carefully about this, and discuss it with your manager and other departments before you implement, because you are going to get a lot of pushback. Your approach should be "we want to start focusing on critical work, we don't have the resource to work on your project now". Absolutely, don't use it as a play for more staff or you'll find yourself in trouble.
Only go to management with a request for more staff when you can show a benefit to the company. A list of additional tasks that you could take on and what their impact would be for example.
Quitting may be the right answer, but it's always a softer landing to have a new gig lined up before quitting.
It's usually easier to find a new job if you already have one, to boot. In a prospective employer's eyes, "Employed"=="At least a decent worker" and "Unemployed"=="Not able to keep a job". I'm not saying it's fair or accurate, but if you're out of work it's sometimes hard to convince a hiring manager that it was of your own choice.
According to the summary, the poster's boss agrees that they are understaffed, but here he is asking on /. how to convince the higher-ups of that. There are three possibilities:
Short answer: STFU and do your job as best you can, or leave. You have said your peace to your manager, now it's time to leave it alone until approached by management for your ideas on fixing the problem. Either your manager will take up the cause and make things happen, or your manager will see it as tilting at windmills and drop it too. You do not want to be seen as the office malcontent who is always complaining about why things are not getting done. No good will come of it.
Yes, and these are probably the ones management shouldn't even hear about (except in some update meeting).
You don't go to your boss saying "it would run faster if we cached X" or "Jim doesn't know how to use the API, so I'll show him how". You just do it.
The only reason someone asks their boss is if they aren't the right person to make the decision. If Jim can't use the API because he's just not competent, or there's no way a program will perform well without making major change, then that's something the boss needs to deal with.
Have a read of "The Phoenix Project" [http://itrevolution.com/books/phoenix-project-devops-book/] . It's about dev-ops, but also gives an insight into how IT systems are the core of a manufacturing business. Show they add value. Align your IT work with the strategic goals of the business, and show how what you want to achieve with your work will improve the bottom line.
I'm the Director of IT for my company. 1,000 employees, 15 physical servers, 6 ESXi hosts, countless VM's, 12 locations around the country. We have a total of 4 people in IT. Exchange, SQL, Windows, Linux, massive SAN, you name it - we probably have it.
Be careful when talking to management. You might get downsized.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
And I would sit down with them and walk them through the problem and help them come up with their own solution. More often what I see is: I have a problem, I'm not sure if I should do X or Y, what do you think I should do? Or I think I should do Z, what are your thoughts? That's the kind of situation I want to create. They're bringing both the problem and a proposed solution(s). Teach a man to fish, after all.
So really, you just want your reports to keep you entertained, by showing walking you through their working. (Or maybe "in the loop", rather than "entertained").
Unless you've got complete incompetents reporting to you, that shouldn't be necessary (except to keep you in the loop, which I do agree is important).
But when people have a *real* problem that they can't solve (i.e. someone needs to be on a performance plan; or the project is failing and needs a massive overhaul; or the budget needs to be increased) then going to a manager with a solution might not always go down so well.
I guess there is some middle ground (hiring one more staff member, slight scope changes, etc). But I don't think most people have an issue making those kind of suggestions.
"Bring a solution, not a problem" is a good maximum for normal decisions, but it's also a crutch managers use when they don't want to make a hard decisions. It's a lame way to say "Nope, I just don't want to think about that ... just deal with it".
Then this solution should've been presented beside more costly solutions, and assuming the owners aren't complete idiots, they'll probably consider their options, fire a slacker and spread the load across the rest of the dept. or fire a slacker, then replace him with a NEW talent to keep everyone on their toes.
It really depends on what kind of year the company would be having. I understood this is a small shop, small shop politics are the environment. Owners still look for the profit and have to keep the shop running smoothly to compete. Sometimes bottlenecks get Roto-Rooter. 'S a fact, man.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Because it is the boss' job to come up with a solution to this kind of problem.
Sure the boss can come up with a solution. But as a boss I would love suggestions / proposals / ideas what every to help solve problems. I definitely would not want to be working in an IT shop when all the ideas come from one guy. That's a company destined for failure.
And what makes this a boss problem?
If you worked for me as a manager of people, YOU should worry about YOUR job because as a manager (boss) it is your job to solve that kind of problem. By saying it is your employee's job to come up with a solution to a management problem, you are saying you are lazy and expendable. I should fire YOU and promote HIM.
It's everyone's job to come up with solutions to problems. Because someone else might come up with a solution to a problem by no means the others are lazy.
Guess what if one of my staff consistently comes up with good solutions he or she is a very good candidate for a promotion. And I have no issue what so every that people be promoted above me. I am definitely not arrogant enough to think that someone working for me will never become my boss. Which by the way has happened a few times.
And here is the rub. Most of us who work in IT it is our job to make out own job obsolete. That's what we do, we automate our own jobs away.
And, your suggestion is to tell them how they can outsource most of his job thus making him redundant.
You don't make people redundant you make the role redundant. If the individual is able and willing to take on a new role it is generally a promotion or raise. If the person can not fulfil a new role then generally they are given handsome payouts. Which I have now received 3 of over the years. It's basically a big fat almost tax free pile of money. Bills get paid debts are cleared and your standard of living improves.
So what I said was. Get rid of those services that you should most definitely not be managing in house. Thus freeing up resources. Which are people. Which can be used to solve real business problems not just make sure people stay within their ridiculous Exchange mail box quotas.
So I'm would definitely and have said we are making your role redundant. You got some options. A take the money and run or B. take on this more challenging role with a raise. Both are great outcomes for individuals.
It's attitudes like the one you express that I filter out of the organisation as quickly as I can. "It's not my problem, it's so and so's" People who express this attitude are people I know are not helping the company make money. Which means they are dead weight. Typically the method for handling them is straight forward. It's to performance manage them. Generally this process is easy. As this personality type basically makes the whole situation implode in weeks of informing them they are under performance management review. Which by the way generally leads to no payout.
It is rare that someone actually gets fired. You really have to be a walking disaster to be fired. Theft and or interpersonal issues involving threats or actions must be involved to justify be fired. Just being incompetent is not enough.
If you have to play those sort of games, it's time to look for greener pastures. Let the CEO reap what he sows and find a place where your services are valued.
Cheap storage VM.
I'm serious.
Casteism
Send offer and respond with resume, isn't that a bit backwards?
Oh, and like a cousin once told my great grandmother- nobody's going to get excited over somebody born in 1970 who needs a girdle. (ok, so the original version was more nobody's going to r*p3 a woman born in 1902, but the same idea applies).
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
There's your problem right there, Vern.
You have $30-50/hr staff doing $15/hr work. Just quantify it. You have an easy case to make, although the current IT manager should have done this by now.
Document the hours spent on helpdesk work by higher paid staff. That should be enough justification on its own. But also document any delays, setbacks, or lost productivity from having you guys cover helpdesk crap.
Management will see that they are losing high-value productivity to low-value tasks. That is only acceptable your IT department is overstaffed.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
I think it stands for "work".
But I understand your confusion.
Security.
A shop your size - you're staffed correctly as far as headcount is concerned. Need to cross-train your programmers to help with the day-to-day helpdesk stuff.
Once the plane is safely on auto pilot for a long flight, one of the pilots is effectively redundant, being a backup to the backup to the autopilot that is the other pilot. Therefore he's basically occupying a seat in the cockpit with nothing to do. So getting him to do some work - as a steward - seems entirely appropriate. It's got NOTHING to do with employing or not employing someone for the cost, it's about recognising that the pilot is a largely a supernumerary. Better to get some value out of him than zero....
Go to your management with a professional, well written and researched proposal document stating the problem and solution and how it will save the company money.
Don't bother! Start your own company or move to another company. Are you going to get a pay rise, options, stock or bonus for convincing them to hire more IT staff? You should aim to change companies every 3 to 5 years for higher real compensation unless the company offers you a real incentive to stay. Not w*nky Christmas parties, fancy coffee machines, title changes and a better looking chair. We are talking hard cash. If they are not going to give you a bundle more money, then move on. End of story. Period. And if you are thinking about "loyalty", forget about it. Companies are not loyal to their employees. When they want/need to "let you go", they will tell you to f*ck off with cold eyes quicker than you can type "IT Jobs" into google.
"I don't pay my staff to find..." You must rub a lot of people up the wrong way with that attitude.
Er, pull the other one... nobody who comments on Slashdot has ever had a single girlfriend, let alone two!
Why abruptly? There is no need for rudeness. Just find another job and move on in a cordial manner.
How computers work hasn't actually changed that much. I'm a JavaScript programmer. I find it valuable to have a clue about assembly language. It gives me a better idea of what sorts of things are more likely to be heavily optimized when dropped into these modern JIT's for instance.
But on the flip-side of that, yes, there are higher level concepts that weren't born of nothing. OOP got popular for all the crap-tacular C that's been written by all the old hands out there. Sadly, that resulted in the same types of people writing crap-tacular OOP and adding getters/setters a super-class and interface to absolutely everything (*facepalm).
The fact of the matter is, it's very easy to make that soporophic 70 grand a year with only the slightest clue as to what you're doing with an IDE and one language. There will always be people who confuse programming with any other job where after college, you can get away with barely learning anything new over the course of an entire year. Truly actively self-teaching programmers are rare and will become more so the more the barrier to entry is lowered for people who don't want to learn and are making a mostly-doomed career choice for themselves because they like the years of college to starting salary ratio.