The Glade 4.0

On average how many stations/computers/users are there relative to each "tech support" person? When I say tech support I mean the person that actually sits down with a user and walk them through a fix or fixes it for them (hands on type of support). (not including web dev, db mgmt etc)

I know it is kind of a vague question. It would change for different industries of course. If it helps, I am in the k-12 education area. We have minimum of 2 workstations for every classroom, many labs with 20+ machines, a SMARTboard in every classroom, mobile laptop carts as well as a laptop for each certified teacher in the district. (lots of technology).

And I apologize for my typing and grammar skills. I am on a helluva lot o drugs right now (medicine not pleasure hehe).

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Hokanu
Duty is a magnificent blessing because it is the sign of trust from the universe.
END OF LINE.

It has changed dramatically throughout my I.T. career. In "very good" support situations, the ratio was sometimes as low as 50 or 75 to 1 technician. These days, I would say it's much closer to 300-500 users to 1 technician in my experience. There has been a LOT of cutting back in the last 10 years, everyone wants to do more with less. I would love to say that there's a right ratio, but it's dependent on the skill level of your users, the skill level of your technicians, how well your network/PC's/images are designed, etc.

A school district is probably going to have less support than most actual businesses. They're also going to have far more draconian usage policies.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Guess I have it good. I directly support about 50 people, plus I can be called on for escalated support. This is an engineering company.

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This cold and dark tormented hell
Is all I`ll ever know
So when you get to heaven
May the devil be the judge

It has varied quite a bit, anywhere from 15 to currently about 5000+ I cant get exact numbers, would take several weeks to get the count's and we have alot of equipment with no way to query for it, but I do 2nd level support for every piece of electrical equipment in a retail store everything from Cash registers, EAS Pedastal's to the DB Servers, to the Point of Sale system, to personnel CRT's, Thin Clients etc..

There is 6 of us on the 2nd level team, to support 2000 - 3000 stores, averaging probably from 5-10 for some of our smallers, to 50 for some of the larger's thats just PC's not counting Cash Registers, Scanner's EAS Pedastal's, Pin Pad's, Printer's, RMU's etc.. We have VNC access to every PC in our store's as well as Dell Remote Access or backdoor (ILO Digi's etc) to power up server's reboot them, etc. Then there is 5 on our 3rd level team, who write most of the change record's fix defect's etc..

Majority of our work is working out the problems and then writing a solution database for India, so if a store calls and says register is hung at XXX you type in XXX in the database and gives you step by step instructions on how to fix it, we generally only handle stuff truely screwed, item database completely blown, etc.

Yup, that's good times these days.

When I was doing IT for our university, each of the IT people directly supported @ 150-200 people.

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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

Wow, thanks for the confirmation. Been not really enjoying it lately, but I suppose I should count my blessings. Things may change drastically in a few months, too, as we finish a merger and re-organization. My job description and place in the organizational structure within the company actually specifies that I'm more server support than help desk, etc., but they've never really fleshed that out.

_________________
This cold and dark tormented hell
Is all I`ll ever know
So when you get to heaven
May the devil be the judge

We've got 3.5 client techs to manage roughly 700 workstations or so, last time we estimated.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Do you mean the two are correlated? i.e. - a more draconian policy allows for few problems therefore less support?

Thanks for the feedback so far. I am trying to gather numbers so we can make an informed proposal regarding the size of our department. We are far too small in my opinion to adequately server our client base.

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Hokanu
Duty is a magnificent blessing because it is the sign of trust from the universe.
END OF LINE.

Somewhat, Hokanu. The school district is also just plain more likely to balk at IT expenses, and to try to share IT resources amongst multiple locations.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

My department has 8 first line technical helpdesk agents (who directly take over the user's workstations remotely...there are no onsite staff through most of the country) and 4 second line agents (we fix stuff the helpdesk can't resolve) supporting about 1100ish stock brokers + 500ish assistants across Canada. If hardware support is needed, we contract through a third party.

The helpdesk does NOT provide "how to" support except as the occasional courtesy. There are a few procedural helpdesks for some various applications, as well as a training team, but for the most part, is the employee's responsibility to be proficient in the use of their PC.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

They are correlated, but it's the other way around. IT departments in school districts tend to be both understaffed and underskilled.

You have to keep in mind, nepotism and cronyism runs rampant among school administration. A big chunk of their funding goes toward paying district administration staff who sit around and take 3-hour lunch breaks. This doesn't leave a lot left in the budget to hire qualified, competent staff.

It builds toward an environment where blocking .jpg images from the network seems like a fantastic solution to making sure kids don't have access to pornography in the school computer labs.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Our people are pretty good but that fact that our entire department is 12 people is a bit mind boggling. Especially given our propensity to sell ourselves as a technologically forward thinking school district.
There are 3 technicians who do hands on repair. We support over 3500 workstations. Our district has about 17000 students.
1 helpdesk phone person, 1 db admin, 1 HW specialist (switches, wireless, printservers etc), 1 software person (maintains images and packages software for remote distribution), 2 trainers, 1 web master, 1 admin. We have one other person who was hurt on the job (she was a tech but had back surgery) and she is filling a role now keeping AD up to date.

As it is split, I have about 1300 machines, another tech has 1300 and the last one has about 900 (uneven due to size of schools).

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Hokanu
Duty is a magnificent blessing because it is the sign of trust from the universe.
END OF LINE.

Desktop support is generally in the multiple of 100's to 1.

In the company I work for I would say its around 200-300 to 1. Of course understand there are systems in place to resolve 75% of tech problems before needing to send someone out. If your support system is less advanced in design and desktop support is basic support it should be closer to 50 to1 or so.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

I think i support about 800 pcs maybe more.

Wow, again. I guess this is why the new company that's taking us over apparently doesn't really bother trying to fix client machines. We've heard that they generally just have the user send in the hard drive, and they send out a new one. I can't wait to see how that goes over with our users.

_________________
This cold and dark tormented hell
Is all I`ll ever know
So when you get to heaven
May the devil be the judge

Hmm. That still gets the user opening the PC and poking around inside.

The stock brokerage I work for is owned by one of the big 5 Canadian banks. The bank helpdesks DO send out hardware support to fix PCs. For the brokerage, we don't. This is part of a more expensive service contract we have to keep them up and running. If they have a hardware problem (or even an OS problem that prevents booting), our hardware contractor brings them out a "new" computer, already imaged and ready to go with a minimum of hassle. Then the contractor takes the computer with the problem back to their warehouse, where any defective parts are relaced and the hard drive is reimaged, then it's put into the warehouse for reuse.

They generally don't need to worry about file transfer or backup, as the user's save everything to network drives. It's elegant and quick.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Hmm, our jobs are probably separated differently in the military than a normal IT operation, but I don't even want to think about it. We're so freaking under manned. I won't go into the details, but it's nuts. I really miss the pre-9/11 days.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Hardware: 1 tech per ~200-250 users
Software: 1 tech per ~200-250 users (adding together frontline and tier 2)

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I worked for a college for a bit, admin'd the $11 mil replacement of their entire network and computer infrastructure in 96 through 2001.

Overall usage policies are really REALLY lax at a state college compared to corporate america.

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In time, this too shall pass.

Me and another guy take care of about 500 users and at least half that in actual systems and a quarter of that being printers.

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"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

Taskiss, State higher education policies are looser because the state doesn't want to get into what is or is not appropriate subjects for research. Everything you block is state-sponsored censorship, since it's a public institution.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Colleges aren't K-12 school districts. First off, their students are mostly over the age of 18 and legally their own guardian. Second, they're more interested in using technology as a general rule, and are more willing to spend the budget on an actual IT staff.

Both institutions want to block out porn. The k-12 school district wants to do it to prevent a lawsuit that arises from minors looking at porn. The university may have that as a concern because some of their students are under 18, but the bigger issue is malware and network security. If some college kid is able to surf porn in his dorm room, the university doesn't give a rat's ***. They're more concerned with blocking it from the computer labs, and they have staff that understand you can set different restrictions for different rooms.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Depends on the setup. Long long ago in a city far far away, when I did desktop support for a school, we did work in bulk. We'd mass copy harddrives, deploy 50 computers at a time to the labs/classrooms, and since students have a higher propensity to hose up a computers (no fear of getting fired), we would just format any machine with an issue. No worries about loss of personal files since nothing was stored on the hard drive. A lot less troubleshooting - if we couldn't fix it in a few minutes, just wipe it and reinstall DOS/Win 3.1. There were three of us who worked all six main campus buildings, and another guy who worked the satellite campuses. It's been a while, but I think we dealt with about 3000 PCs.

At my current employer, computer usage is more complex and diversified. The number of desktops is about the same, but there's no way our IT staff could get away with a minimal support crew in this environment.

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