Re: [SAGE] determining quantity of support personnel

[Mike McShane <mcshane@cs.umn.edu>]

"Let it be known that Eric Mercer once said.."
> Does anyone have any pointers to information about how to determine how 
> many personnel are required to support a given number of machines.  As 
> crazy as it may sound, I'm looking for a number like: 1 person can 
> support 100 PCs.
> 
> Administration here wants such a number so that they can justify 
> increased costs of computer support in the department.  We currently 
> have two desktop support people & one unix/network admin (me).  We are 
> supporting about 10 unix servers, 3 NT servers, and approximately 
> 200-300 PCs (win98 - winNT).

Right now, we are running 15-20 unix based servers here, 5 Windows
based servers and over 660 client machines running anything from
Windows 98 (yeah, I know) to Solaris 2.9..  This does not include the
almost 100 printers we maintain, or the various laptops we are forced
to deal with.

These machines are scattered across 5 or 6 different buildings across
the UofMN campus and 2 remote (off campus) labs.

For staffing, we have 12 full time employees, but one of them is our
technical manager, and 2 of them only work half-time for our
staff.  One of the full-timers is our web admin. We also have 15
half-time student employees, they mostly cover the helpdesk duties.

In the simplest of terms, we have 1 admin for every 42 computers.
This number is misleading though,  I would estimate we really have 1
admin for every 100-150 machines.

-- 
Mike McShane
University of Minnesota CS/IT System Staff
At 200MPH, you have no friends!