Your IT Dept?

Just wondered how many users your IT Dept support and how many are in your IT dept. I have been working for a small company after working for a global company and after 7 months at the new company i feel that there is nothing to do for most of the week and feel that i may have made a big mistake in moving. I moved from a global company so the IT job was busy, but i had no exposure to servers, the job i have now is quiet but i have been put in charge of the servers and have time to look into projects and have some time to study. We support 80 users, have no helpdesk, and their is two of us, but i am not sure that i am really in the right job!
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I'm sure it'll fluctuate. When something breaks or you have to implement something new, you'll probably long for those peaceful days.
My company employees about 160 people, but only roughly 60 computer users.
It's just me and my boss.
With only two or three IT people in a small company, everyone does every level of support. There is usually very little in the way of separation-of-duties (especially if the company is not security-minded). If you have a particularly techo-inpet (or just needy) CxO, you'll be getting IMs on your BlackBerry every hour and seven days/week.
Older IT people usually love the smaller, boring start-ups because they are much less bureaucratic than a corporate enterprise, and the IT problems they have are usually simpler to solve (assuming they have the budget to solve them). The older director will dream of a delegating work to his juniors, but will end up doing many of the 3AM "fixes" himself. Very few people to delegate to in a small company.
There is usually no separation between infrastructure IT and product development IT at small companies either. You might find yourself delaying that Exchange Server upgrade to instead fix a software product build script, or even provide product support at a customer's site. As a small company IT guy, many hats you will wear.
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and currently a little over 1,400 workstations active.
(We have level 1 outsourced but sometimes do level 1 tickets)
Seems like your in a position that you can set up a strong system Billybob, I don't know what resources you have and budget but I would start mapping out some stuff.
-Larry Ellison, CEO, Oracle
Studying: SCJA
Occupation: Information Systems Technician
I'm in a similar situation. It's basically me and one other guy who just does the SQL/intranet stuff.
What kind of business do you work for? (ie, what does your company do) Do you have work orders? Sales quotes? Follow up on quote? Engineering Change Requests? Inventory process? Them are just some examples of processes we have at my company.
If nothing else, take some time and turn into a social butterfly. Walk around and talk with each sales person, talk with the engineers, talk with production personnel, ect... Ask them how they think you could better help them with their job with the network. I'd say just send an email, but if your really twiddling your thumbs you'll probably get more responses and people would take it more serious if you ask them face to face.
I had a coworker for a short time last year to man the help desk while I worked on bigger problems, but he decided to act like an idiot because he just got his degree and wasn't making $50k at his first job. I hate to tell him but Monroe, LA isn't exactly a hotbed for high paying IT jobs.
Working on: Waiting on the mailman to bring me a diploma
What's left: Graduation![/size]
We support ~1200 users I believe the current count is at over 40 offices. There are three of us in our IT department with our IT Manager being the only current fulltime employee, myself and the other were reduced to 32 hours a week late last year since in an effort to cut costs. I would love to have some more free time... unfortunately to save our own sanity, we typically put in more than our 32 hours without extra pay or just constantly work to the limit because the stress of being overworked is far better than the stress of users nagging you because things aren't getting done fast enough and they don't understand why 3 people can't get it all done.
This actually is exactly why I think that for someone starting off a small business would be ideal for learning. You have to wear a lot of hats which will develop some skills that you normally would not acquire and being the sole (or one of two) guy who can fix anything will really push your skills if it all goes to pot. You do most likely lose out on having a mentor type person though. I still have yet to find that in any of my jobs so far, unfortunately, so all my learning on the job learning has been trial by fire. I still believe that is the swiftest way to develop skills.
I'd say my job could be considered a Jr. systems admin job, because after the systems admin, I'm the next person to go to for general IT help, servers, and network issues.
I've been doing my current job for about 2 years, and while were not a small company, were not the largest in the world either. The prospect of the job before I started was that I would get a lot of hands on across many different technologies.....yeah that hasn't happened. Mainly I've been told that when things break I'm to answer the phones and take all the calls from the remote sites, which call in to let us know things are broke, but I already know this before the phones start ringing...so I don't need over 200 calls telling me this.
In retrospect I should not have taken this job, although I thought at the time it would be great for my first IT job, it hasn't turned out that way. After all I do for the company (which I do quite a bit), I'm stuck at a dead end company, having to carry around a company phone, and I still get paid less than 30k.
Sorry for the rant.
This is right on! There are 3 of us supporting about 100 users. I have posted about this before where I, as a Systems Administrator am wearing MULTIPLE hats. I started out on helpdesk, for 3 years eventually working my way up to 2nd tier and then left that company for this Systems Administrator position thinking that that was a step up. Not really, just a glorified helpdesk position.
Now we have seperate teams for Citrix, Server Support, AD Infrastructure, SQL, Messaging, VM Ware, Desktop, Web Services etc. I've been lucky for the last 3 years working in a 3rd line team that covers several of these area's but its now being split to fit in with the company model and its left me thinking that it could be time to look to a smaller organisation.
I think in a smaller company you would definatley get exposure to more area's and that is definatley a good thing imo.
Look at your backup procedure. Is it perfect? Anything that could be improved?
Maybe do a test restore on a random server every month. Not all restores work perfectly you know. You could restore to a virtual machine, this basically "mirrors" a production server, and you can do all kinds of breaking/fixing and testing on the mirror.
Do you have monitoring set up, to notify you if a hard drive is e.g over 70% full, or if a critical service stops on a server? Or do you have to wait for users to report problems?
I recommend this book
Amazon.com: The Practice of System and Network Administration: Thomas A. Limoncelli, Christina J. Hogan: Books
It's not very technical, it gives you suggestions for processes to follow, and has "iceing on the cake" sections which are suggestions for making a near-perfect system even better, preventing and anticipating problems before they happen, and getting more praise and recognition from management (= more money + job stability)
FYI I support 300 users in 7 locations, with 15 servers. I am 2nd line with some 3rd line stuff. There are 2 people at my level, 1 peson doing 1st line, and 1 network admin.
my specific portion of that covers about 20 locations with about 300 or so users..of course each location has its own server and some locations have 2 servers.
my mix of users include many who also use vpn from home occassionally and many who use some type of communication device whether is blackberry or palm.
I find myself doing lots of level 1 helpdesk stuff, lots of level 2 desktop admin stuff and some level 3 system admin stuff...it varies with the day.
First Department:
4 part time techs
4 System Admins
About 4500 students
About 1500 teachers
Lots of machines, printers, and laptops...plus a/v equipment
Second Department:
1 Part-Time Tech (me)
1 System Admin
2 Full Time Techs
About 2000 Students
About 500-700 teachers
Same type of support
These numbers don't include Board of Education Office support, Secretaries, Principals, and various other offices like Child Study and Janitors. We did it all and were generally stretched pretty thin. You haven't lived till you worked in a school district....you see the true IT Departments there lol!
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