Staffing question

amyamandaallen · February 2006

Hi,

Im trying to apply for a raise and the issue of staffing levels has come up. I was wondering if there are any guidelines of roughly how many IT staff per users there should be. I realise this isnt an exact science.

We have 120-130 users and pc's, over 45 different but local sites ( most within 10 miles with 1-3 users on each, 9 servers including a citrix server and support 99% of the hardware internally. We do pay for some additional 3rd line support just to cover our servers and bespoke programs. We currently have 2 staff.

Just wondering what others have in similar sized companies.

sprkymrk · February 2006

I work on a small network in a secure environment. We support about 450+ users/computers and 25 servers. We have a staff of 9 as follows:

1 Program Manager
1 Sr LAN Admin (me)
1 LAN Admin
1 Administrative Assistant
1 Audio-Visual person
4 Help Desk

Our LAN is physically spread out among about 30 buildings on about 300+ acres.

amyamandaallen · February 2006

thanks for the reply - any others?

strauchr · February 2006

I used to work for an insurance company in Australia that had about 350 users and roughly 50 sites across Australia. We had a centralised IT dept. which consisted of 5 Help Desk, 3 Desktop, 3 Network, 2 datacentre, a Manager for each dept. plus a Technical Services Manager and a CIO as well as countless programmers and manager for these programmers.

I always thought that this was overkill and certainly looking at those numbers it does seem it however we were always extremely busy. We did have a very high availability network tough and a high level of service was required because insurance is big business and they couldn't afford not to have things running.

Also, to put things in perspective this was in the days of NT 4 and Exchange 5.5 ruling which this environment was. there was a citrix server, AS/400 systems and a few insurance apps to support including an ancient dos based program from the late 80's!

So it can depend on the type of company you have not just the size. Insurance and Finance are usually always high availability sites so therefore need more people.

But I also worked for a Crane hire company and they had about 200 users and roughly 12 sites but I only came in half day a week for them. Of course their systems were in shambles.

amyamandaallen · February 2006

thankyou - any others?

drainey · February 2006

I work for an Argricultural manufacturer. We support 400 user/pc's in 8 local buildings/manufacturing plants and 6 more locations as far as 90 miles away. As well as 60 laptops for reps spread across the US and Canada. We have 9 Windows servers. As well as some building to building wireless solutions. We also have 60 IPAQ's in the field with a proprietary inventory program for the field reps to use to track inventory at dealer/retailer stores. We also have 8 UNIX servers and 25 Unix/Spark systems and an AS400 mainframe system.

We have:
1 IT Director (AS400 Manger)
1 PC Systems Co-ordinator (my boss)
3 PC System Specialist (my job)

1 UNIX Admin

1 AS400 Operations Specialist
1 AS400 Data Entry Specialist
1 AS400 Programmer

But the 4 of us PC guys handle all networking and Telecom issues as well as anything pc related.

Staffing question

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