shunty

working out how many desktop support/engineers per amount of pc's in a company please.
I need something either quoted from a blue-chip org or legal...
trying to justify IT staff to board as usual yearly downsizing programmes by twatting bean counters!!!! god I hate finance/accountants!!

soon there will be no staff required any fooking where, always bare minimum, it's no wonder 90% of companies are falling apart.

shunty

beemerboy

Shunty,
This will be greatly affected by the differing platforms, differing software, hardware, client/server ratio, bespoke systems, and ultimately the confidence/ability of the support engineers.

if its JUST desktop support with say basic client/server architecture and does not involve anything too technical.

the derogatory title being a "keyboard swapper" then i would think 1 engineer per 100 users would be able to cope, in a structured envirironment, maybe less if using call logging and helpdesk.

i will ask about and see what other companies have.

BB

camk

We worked to 1:80 as they are doing deskside support including software and anything up to 1:150 if its just hardware. This was in 18000 userbase across Europe Middle East and Africa in about 100 sites. As Beemerboy said a lot depends on the environment and the engineers. Gartner is your best point of info on industry standards. These numbers also included all management and project work by the staff themselves, e.g. server installs but did not include first line call handling for most sites.

PS Laptop/Desktop split makes a difference in complexity....

[Edited by camk - 8/8/2003 10:06:41 AM]

shunty

yeh good points BB & CamK, I had discussed this with my boss about varying levels of platform/hardware/type of user/laptops etc.

userbase is only 800 UK & 300 Europe users under our remit currently....
approx 300 technical staff out of this total...

over 300 laptops

shunty

Suresh

To be honest if investment in IT solutions had ever delivered the promised benefits there would be no need for downsizing the IT side. The reality is that billions has been pi$$ed away on useless developments that did nothing other than train overpaid contractor in the latest whizzy language. This has a knock on effect to the whole perception of value added by IT including support functions.

IMHO the bean counters are right and the IT side only has itself to blame for what is now coming. Get used to it.

Suresh (Finance)
- Flame suit on -

beemerboy

suresh, you will shortly be experiencing some downtime.....

normal functionality will be resumed once you succumb to the IT gods!!! LMFAO



BB

Suresh

BB,

Every bloody morning mate!
We have an ERP :O implmentation that fails to run in some shape or form almost daily. Only cost €15Mio (more than double the budget with half the functionality) so quite a bargain then. Mail server upgrade : lost 5 days of mail history just like that. I could go on. and on. and on.

Suresh

Burt

sounds like your having fun mate
I know the feeling only too well

[Edited by Burt - 8/8/2003 3:01:18 PM]

camk

Yes but Suresh if it wasn't for IT you guys would still be working in manual ledgers and there would be no email just inter office memo's......its easy to criticise the issues(of which there are many). However the advances are just seen as commonplace now. Ask yourself this, is anyone on ina real business actually paid cash now ? Your AP/AR department is not really using cheques much and your certainly unlikely to need to be writing them out by hand even if you do use them...I could go on......in fact I will. The biggest issue I see is Finance guys wanting to continually check and recheck the figures from one system againat another, now thats job creation on a grand scale. I was a finance/IT guy and I know how creative accountancy really is....'lets just stick in an accrual'...FFS talk about the pot calling the kettle black

Scooby96

Think its about 250/1 here - bloody hopeless barstewards

beemerboy

...something to put in your bean-counter's pipe there....

what did people do before email???
oh, they had to use the fax and telephone, and maybe get out of their chair.

i laugh when people go... "oh i lost a mail from 1996"
"so??"

just get on with your life you saddo..is my reply.

people dont realise how much they rely on systems and services.

if our leased line goes down, its like me cutting everyones legs off!!! (so i do take it down from time to time.....)

hehehe

good weekend y'all,

Dazza

Suresh

camk, you have almost rumbled me (but not quite).
Working with semi manual ledgers would be a lot more effective than the pretend solution (shambles) that we we ended up with here. Would be a lot cheaper too and real-time!
E-mail indeed has its uses especially for distributing data, but also causes people to stop talking to each other for more qualitative communications.

Advances are there but not as great as the IT industry has been selling to the users. You do realise that there is no new economy, right?
It doesn't help that the IT function in our organisation unfortunately has had too much power and delivers platforms not solutions.

Nice weekend.

Suresh
Shutting down

beemerboy

Hmmmm??
so who signed this off then.....????

LOL

BB

Foot_Tapper

I'd go along with around 80-100 seemed to be the average a year or 2 ago. Now it seems like 4 guys for 600.(where I am, anyway)

There are other guys, who do bits n bobs
2*server
1*unix
2 MACD work (moves adds changes deletes )
1*team lead


[Edited by Foot_Tapper - 8/8/2003 4:15:00 PM]

Mungo

MACD work? Getting in the burger?

JayBee

Shunty

Work for a Blue Chip as a service manager and given a 80/20 desktop-lappy mix on NT 4 and a 3 year depreciation cycle and a STABLE/locked-down image AND larger "campus" sites and not alot of traveling - 1:250 is about right on pure operations (fixing).

Goes to about 1:300 on newer operating systems but if you have a mix the lower ratio MUST be used or you will be under staffed.

Get into prokect work and you need to look again, but REMEMBER to take this into account.

Also you team will be taking the tickets that the h/desk cannot fix on 1st/2nd or 3rd line so they will be the potential sticky ones. Look at 4.5 to 5.5 tickets per person per day max utilisation, depending on the ticket mix (analyse the ticket types, you can do 30 ketboards a day, afetr all!)

Travel between sites needs to be averaged out at 1-2 tickets worth depending on the spread of sites.

Mail me in the profile if you need to clarify or need anything further.

Good luck. I have to do this every quarter!

jaybee

shunty

guys, sorry I've taken so long to reply....been off buying a new motor
let me read through all the replies & comment....

cheers

shunty

midget1500

in a software house i used to work in they had 4 IT support staff for 120 developers.

Mr Gee

Bring back the Post-It !!

beemerboy

yeah, but developers are reknowned for *ucking pc's up consistently. LOL.

BB

shunty

lol @ the last 2 replies both correct of course

shunty

shunty

right, just read all the replies....some interesting ones from suresh the bean counter....

the problem summed up:

finance order software that does what they want **** everyone else & DO NOT consult IT department.....
developers look at it & say we can install/configure that it's easy (most of them can't map a unc path in reality).....
software's installed, users hate it because no one did any end user acceptance testing...so loads of options they need are missing.
everyone phones IT on Monday morning & says what ya gonna do to make it work then ??
IT advise that they are all dikcheads who know **** all...install & configure properly then liase with 3rd party software supplier to find out that their support people also know **** all...
project manager gets pay rise & promotion.

all IMHO of courxse

shunty

ProperCharlie

I think shunty's identified the basic problems:

1) People don't talk to each other about what they intend to do.
2) People do not know what the product they want is, or what the product that they have actually does.

Developers have a natural tendency to add bells and whistles to things. The more complicated software gets, the harder it is to get people to use it. Eg:

i spend about 20k getting a custom built access db to record and monitor and report on all the shifts that had been worked by staff. It was supposed to make everything easier. When the thing was eventually delivered, the admin girls had a look at it and went "**** that for a laugh" and carried on using a huge excel spreadsheet

I lost patience with the whole project and nothing further happened...

shunty

PC - that's women for ya....can't even work a "clicker" let alone a software prog

shunty

ProperCharlie

shunty - too right. the main stumbling block was that they couldn't cut and paste into the fields. I was like - that's right, you have to enter the data.

So you can't cut and paste from last week's spreadsheet?

No.

Oh. **** it then.

What's a man supposed to do ?

shunty

shunty