[nycbug-talk] how much is too much?

[pete wright]

On 12/4/05, Mohan Singh <mohansingh68 at gmail.com> wrote:
> $work has about 2 dozen employees, all with windows machines. In addition,
> there are about 40 rack servers running FreeBSD, with a couple of Linux ones
> in the mix.
>
> A single sysadmin (me) has to take care of all the Unix machines (not
> generally a problem), all the webservers (ditto), work as help support (a
> big time eater), diagnose Windows issues (a huge time eater), write
> documentation, and do other office technical work (pretty much support
> anything that runs on electricty).
>
> This is obviously too much work for one person to handle, but how many
> additional employees would you think are needed? I'm thinking at least one
> more full time admin, plus another junior admin/help desk person.
>
> For those of you who work at similar sized companies, how many IT people do
> you have on hand?
>
> MS
>


I was in a very similar situation a while back.  In retrospect I think
the most important thing to tak care of first is creating a rigid
support policy before adding any more heads to your group.  this way
if you develop the support pipeline (helpdesk ticketing system, or
whatever) it may be easier to quantify how many heads you need to add 
when asking the money people for support.  You may also find that by
having a ridgid structure in place may actually help things enough
that you need less people that you would have thought (a good HD
ticketing system can be self documenting, especially in a small
environment).

-p



--
~~o0OO0o~~
Pete Wright
www.nycbug.org
NYC's *BSD User Group