Re: [SAGE] determining quantity of support personnel

["Steve G. Hilliard" <flowman@arches.uga.edu>]

Eric,

What I did here at UGA is start with Mark's formula.  Since we have 40k
faculty staff and students, I came up with 256 junior SAs to 85 senior SAs
;-)  Considering I have a staff of four I assumed that the administration
would never buy that!  What this overlooks in our situation is that system
administration and computer support is not completely centralized, so
there are other people on campus that support our users, but they aren't
part of Enterprise IT.  The number I needed was how many sysadmins we need 
to support just the centralized UNIX services we provide the campus.

I also read in Limoncelli and Hogan (great book!) that a ratio commonly
found in universities is 500users/SA to 1000users/SA.  When I divided 40k
by 1000 and plugged that into Mark's formula I got 16 juniors/6.5 seniors,
which is much closer to what we intuitively feel we need.

In our case it may have been worth it--we have been told there is a good 
chance we will get another UNIX admin, and the engineering group may get 
another UNIX builder who can help us with some of the programming 
duties, freeing up some of our time.  It's not enough, but it is a 
start.

Best of luck!

Steve
On Thu, 1 Aug 2002, Eric Mercer wrote:

> Ruth Milner wrote:
> > Well, it's been said many times before but I guess it bears repeating:
> > there is no fixed ratio of admins to machines that applies to everyone.
>  > ...
> 
> I know this, and I was embarrassed to have to ask, but I had to ask.
> 
> You are correct.  Mark's article seems to be the best answer I've seen 
> yet.
> 
> I received one response that said, "...if you have 3 PC admins for 300 
> machines and they are always busy and not able to do anything else but 
> fight fires then you need to add more admins for the PC side."
> 
> That's a good answer.  Possibly even the right answer.  It would be 
> enough for me.  Unfortunately, it isn't really an answer that most 
> administrative-types will accept.  They like the simple formulas.
> 
> Many thanks to all those who have responded and to all who may yet respond!
> 
> -Eric
> 

-- 
------------------------------------------------------
Steve G. Hilliard      "........to administer, divine"
Interim Manager, Production Systems Support
Enterprise IT Services
University of Georgia