[nycbug-talk] how much is too much?

[Aleksandar Kacanski]

Honestly, I don't support ticketing systems for
environment like yours. I would say that ticketing
system does help in strictly service driven
environments with a quick turn-around time and well
defined procedures. (e.a. ISP's). I do like and use
project management systems and collaboration systems,
where projects could and should be assigned, ideas
bounced and solutions posted for future recall.
This approach, does support idea of getting users
involved and helps them learn and fix their own
problems. It also requires from you and staff to write
fast and post lots of info, most if it at the offset
of the new policy. Software and hardware policies are
important part, but you need to have a boss who
actually have a spine to say no to user base and their
bosses. In organizations that support massive 
ghosting procedures and keep everything important on
the server side, user support becomes ratter trivial
thing, specially when you have on-line source of
information for users (wiki's, email, www ....)
I do currently support user base of 150 with junior
admin and myself. But there is also a big difference
between educational environment and industry...
-:)
hope this helps,
/s

--- pete wright <nomadlogic at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
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Aleksandar (Sasha) Kacanski

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