Your IT Dept?

billybob01

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!

dynamik

So study

I'm sure it'll fluctuate. When something breaks or you have to implement something new, you'll probably long for those peaceful days.

undomiel

Study and then plan out and present projects to improve processes on your network. Don't forget to test everything in a lab environment first!

billybob01

I feel like i am in a rut, i need to look into processes, but i just cant find a process that we do in order to map it out and improve on it! Can anyone who has processes in their dept, enlighten me on what kind of processes i could look into? It may be the spark i need to get busy again.

vCole

I agree w/ undomiel & dynamik.

My company employees about 160 people, but only roughly 60 computer users.

It's just me and my boss.

JDMurray

There are typically far less learning opportunities for IT at small and mid-sized companies than in very large organizations. A limited range of systems and equipment. If you out-source everything to hosting services, you control very little of you infrastructure. There also might not be any time or money to provide training, and the IT people are expected to train themselves on their own time and nickle.

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.

jryantech

8 of us
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.

NetAdmin2436

+1 for studying.

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.

arwes

I'm at a fairly large insurance agency that's owned by several banks. Got about 75 in house users and around 60 remote users that use the terminal servers (adding more users to those every week). It's just me and my boss, and he helps out every now & then but mainly he's working on other projects. Everything was just peachy until we switched our insurance software over to a different vendor. The stuff we had was web hosted, and the only problem I had was that every once in awhile I'd have to clear their cache. This new stuff is run locally and we have problems with it having like 20 winword processes running at once, people getting locked out of accounts, and having to reset the remote users in Terminal Services Manager.

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.

msteinhilber

Take advantage of it as others pointed out, study or look for projects you could implement that would benefit your organization.

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.

undomiel

JDMurray wrote: »

There are typically far less learning opportunities for IT at small and mid-sized companies than in very large organizations. A limited range of systems and equipment.
*chomp*
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.

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.

billybob01

Many thanks for the replies everyone, since i have been there, i have migrated the old Exchange 2000 server to 2003 and migrated their isa 2000 to 2006, and have built a test network for them using VMWare. I guess i need to look at this as the ideal opportunity to gain more certs while i can.

CaptainCharisma

I support about 300 - 400 id10ts across 7 offices, another 500+ id10ts out in the field, and another 220+ remote sites. My IT department has 5 people: 2 programmers, 1 guy who fixes (in depth) electronic devices my company uses, the systems admin, and myself. Only the systems admin and myself actually answers the phones and deal with the calls.

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.

markk2008

One of the jobs that I have had in the past was where I was the IT Dept, it was hectic but I did learn an awful lot whilst there.

joey74055

JDMurray wrote: »

There are typically far less learning opportunities for IT at small and mid-sized companies than in very large organizations. A limited range of systems and equipment. If you out-source everything to hosting services, you control very little of you infrastructure. There also might not be any time or money to provide training, and the IT people are expected to train themselves on their own time and nickle.

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.

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.

Mrock4

Although I recently switched from being a tech to a more managerial role, we have approx. 100 people supporting about 5-6k people. There is an additional 10-20 techs who go site to site, but that's about it. Help-desk wise, we have about 40 people, and the remainder of that 100 is managers, and backshops (such as microsoft/unix shops etc). Busy place!

bencairney

I work for a large company, with about 40,000 users. When I first started nearly 10 years ago it was great a bit of everything involved, but as the company has got bigger but now the IT org is much bigger and its been split up so much and is so process driven it has become more difficult to get exposure to different technologies.

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.

steve_f

Some things that you could do to keep busy:

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.

manny355

We have over 1500 users spreadout over 60 different locations in over 3 states

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.

the_Grinch

I worked for two school districts and the numbers were like this:

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!