Number of IT staff V's Users ?

rubber_vomit

Hi all, just a quick query as to what is the current recemended number of IT support staff to the number of users.

I have a total of 60 users which includes 2 remote sites and am on my sweeney. Literally every time I try to do anything constructive either the phone rings or someone approaches my desk and hence I get nothing done evey day except firefighting the daily problems.

It's so frustrating even when you are 5 mins late in the morning and everyone else is yapping away drinking their coffee and you already have 10 messages on you're phone and a queue of people waiting to see you! Agggggg Help


Thanks!!!

No hair left at this stage!

ChipZilla

In my last job there was eight of us for 2500 users and we were worked into the ground. Had to learn to prioritise pretty fast. Some kind of call logging/queue system would be nice, but I dunno if there's anything small enough for your needs.

Only other thing is to get a good lock for your door:dunno:

Boro

/Chipzilla - thats just scary!

I probably have about 40 on 4 sites. God the amount of idiots that you can meet while you are doing this job! ("are you sure you have it plugged in? No? well theres your problem!")

My numbers arent too bad, but as im also programming software sometimes it can get a little hectic with people phoning you all the time while you are trying to finish off a project. Not quite as rushed as you rubber_vomit. Delegation might be the key! Get yourself some young kid who you can send out to restart peoples outlook and change mice/network cables. Then you can put your feet up and work on how best to spend your budget

Mutant_Fruit

It all depends i suppose. If you get a lot of calls from your customers, then maybe 3 people might be needed, even though you only have 60.

But then again, another company might have 2000 customers, but might only need 15 people, as they may not recieve many calls.

You seem to recieve a lot of calls, so maybe 2 people dedicated to phone answering and misc office tasks would be good.

Stephen

i work for a company with about 2000 IT users. There's 4 of us on the 1st-line helpdesk, and 2 more doing 2nd line stuff. Its always the same core bunch of users you end up supporting the whole time, the rest of them are smart enough to manage themselves. There's extended support staff for horrible unpleasant things that we can't handle like SAP and payroll systems. There's a few other guys that manage our servers also.
We have a whole bunch of remote sites, the larger ones have 1 or 2 of their own IT staff. Most of the small ones rely on remote support/occasional call outs.

ChipZilla

Amen Stephen! It's a hardcore bunch of dumbasses who cause the same trouble over and over again. I used to have two people I never picked up the phone for (caller ID - worth it's weight in gold) - one was a guy who would keep every email he owned on the Exchange server until he hit his quota, then try to move everything into his creaky old 2.5Gb PST which had been corrupted and repaired more times than I've had hot dinners (and yes, I showed him umpteen times how to split up PSTs). Needless to say everything would lock up very regularly. The other guy had a penchant for powerpoint presentations, and embedding half a dozen different kinds of video clips into them - AVI, MOV, MPG you name it, he would use it. Ever seen a 600Mb .PPT file? On a PIII 700 laptop with a slow hard drive and 128Mb of RAM? I have. :dunno: :rolleyes:

Users. Can't kill 'em. Can't, erm, kill 'em.

jayok

Well, of course it all depends on what your company does and how heavily it depends on IT, but the accepted corporate average for support is 2% of users (plus IT manager). So if you've 100 users the norm is 2 on a support desk + an IT manager. This would exclude the likes of a server upgrades, etc, which would normally involve drafting in external resource or outsourcing. The only problem is traditionally existing IT staff see this as a "threat" to them learing something new and resist it. But then again, I digress.

seamus

Originally posted by Stephen
i work for a company with about 2000 IT users. There's 4 of us on the 1st-line helpdesk, and 2 more doing 2nd line stuff. Its always the same core bunch of users you end up supporting the whole time, the rest of them are smart enough to manage themselves. There's extended support staff for horrible unpleasant things that we can't handle like SAP and payroll systems.

Yeah, sounds about right. We have a 1500 user base supported by a 6 to 8-strong (constant churn ) helpdesk team. On top of that we have 3 field technicians, 2 on-site engineers for Xerox and Canon. 2nd level support consists of 7 applications specialists (mostly debugging and dealing with that big piece of **** SAP) and 7 operations guys (domain admin, network shares, email, internet, etc).

We're never snowed under, but do have to deal with the same people over and over.

aaf

Originally posted by rubber_vomit
Hi all, just a quick query as to what is the current recemended number of IT support staff to the number of users.

I have a total of 60 users which includes 2 remote sites and am on my sweeney. Literally every time I try to do anything constructive either the phone rings or someone approaches my desk and hence I get nothing done evey day except firefighting the daily problems.

It's so frustrating even when you are 5 mins late in the morning and everyone else is yapping away drinking their coffee and you already have 10 messages on you're phone and a queue of people waiting to see you! Agggggg Help


Thanks!!!

No hair left at this stage!

If you're thinking of getting someone in to do all the donkey/midless work, look no further. I'm looking for a full time job and have a fairly decent grasp of both hardware and software. Depends on where you are based though. I'm based in Dublin, living and working that is.

ChipZilla

Shameless plug there aaf!

seamus

Originally posted by ChipZilla
Shameless plug there aaf!

You have to give him credit though

secret_squirrel

My company has about 200 IT staff (that includes telecoms stuff as well) for about 3200 staff, mostly in dublin but also remote sites in ireland, uk, europe and states.

There are 3 people on the helldesk and about 4-5 software specialists and probably as many as 10-12 hardware ppl backing them up. They also do project related work too though.

tk123

Originally posted by secret_squirrel
My company has about 200 IT staff (that includes telecoms stuff as well) for about 3200 staff, mostly in dublin but also remote sites in ireland, uk, europe and states.

There are 3 people on the helldesk and about 4-5 software specialists and probably as many as 10-12 hardware ppl backing them up. They also do project related work too though.

Ah secret_squirrel is nice to know i'm not the only one who calls it the helldesk!!

gurramok

I work in the I.T. staff section supporting a call centre for 1300 users and another site for 300 users.

13 in deskside support
3 in helpdesk
5 doing netware/ad server and project stuff, another 5 in NT/unix server support
Managers amount to 3 !

Also another 4 souls in telecoms support.

Oh and we do be snowed under daily, language differences in a call centre is a big factor

Only if the company would replace people who leave !

Around 1700-2000 calls a month for help from users.

So about 2% sounds right.

RicardoSmith

The only way to deal with these kinda of situations is to put a IT request/resolution tracking system in place. You have to insist that you'll only accept support requests that are logged, and agree with your manager that you can ignore all support requests unless its a priority 1 item. Oh and you have to agree what warrants a priority of 1,2,3 etc. You can also get managers to sign off on their staffs support requests.

What this does is puts off most of the people who can't be bothered to log a request formally. Allows you to track the time and resources, teams, depts and individuals require from the IT department. This will allow you to have some stats in order to present a case for more resources to help you.

The system should be web based, intranet, internet. What ever best suits your needs. Is should allow you to log phone calls, emails etc. As an interim measure, draw up a word template that users need to submit. I have one I can give you that automates a lot of stuff then emails itself to a specific address.

rubber_vomit

Ricardo that would be great if you could mail that word template on to me (as I haven't time to create one in the first place!!! dublin_male_30atyahoo.co.uk

Thanks folks,some of you mentioned an IT Manager well I guess I am that too ! It's amazing how people in my org (most with 3+ in each dept) refer to the IT dept!!! I mean jesus it's just me in my own Hell with no one to delegate too!

I will see about setting up a call logging procedure which hopefully will put off some of the geeks annoying me constantly. Ohh and did I mention we are moving building too so put that and all the nightmares on my list as well as the phone system support I also have to do.

Ok it's comms but jesus gix a break!!

seamus

You could build a web-based call logging system, and even incorporate tracking for yourself. For simple, personal use, it wouldn't require a whole lot of effort.

Gerry

We use remedy for call logging, and it is a major piece of ****. For a site of your size, it probably isn't worth paying for a system unless its dirt cheap. Best thing is to find some open source web based system that will do the trick , or write one yourself.
This page may be of use, it seems to have links to some full systems.

Don't start using word templates now, that will just cause problems later on.

RicardoSmith

Originally posted by Gerry
We use remedy for call logging, and it is a major piece of ****. For a site of your size, it probably isn't worth paying for a system unless its dirt cheap. Best thing is to find some open source web based system that will do the trick , or write one yourself.
This page may be of use, it seems to have links to some full systems.

Don't start using word templates now, that will just cause problems later on.

I agree that writing one yourself is the best way, but he doesn't have the time or resources to do one himself. I'm only suggesting a word template as a means of filtering the noise of requests and also as a means of proper record keeping. You can always write a script to import them into a db once you have one up and running. How will a word template cause problems???