Number of IT Helpdesk Staff Vs Number of Users?

[wxman]

I have resource issue at one of my sites.

I have always gone with the rule of thumb that 1 IT staff member can cover 75 users

(agreed that all sites differ with complexity of systems supported) – there is no hard and fast rule here.
We use primarily server 2008 R2 (10 off) with 90 XP workstations and laptops) Office 2003, Exchange 2010, Dynamics CRM 2011, SQL 2008 + IBM iSeries system for ERP


Can you post here your current helpdesk/ users ratios at the sites that you work at so that I can build up a business case?

[JoJoGabor]

I would say 1 person should be enough for support of an evironment of that size with a couple of projects. Any large projects/upgrades will require contract resource.

[NotReallyButSeriously]

I would say 1 person should be enough for support of an evironment of that size with a couple of projects. Any large projects/upgrades will require contract resource.

At the moment I'm in an environment supporting 2000+ users, there is 9 of us on the desk.

[xchaotic]

Shouldn't the metric be how crappy/buggy the software is rather than a number of users?
Try 37signals and see how many support people they have per thousand of licenses?

Since you mentioned typical Windows+Office in itself, that's crappy enough the require a person for each 50-70 computers, I'd say. A long time ago I handled 5 wnidows servers + 50 worksations myself, I quit as soon as I could, haven't touched windows since

[vetran]

Depends on the maturity of your support organisation.

If IT are expected to do whatever the users ask plus projects then 75 people is a push. If the users are well trained (can copy / paste and do headings in word), support is limited to a small set off applications and any projects/enhancements properly managed then 75 - 100 users is reasonable per IT head.

I ran 150 users with 2 heads for 7 years and 120 users with 1 head (me) for 4 years. My opposite number ran 130 users with 4 IT heads, but their systems fail daily (maybe if they had fixed the worst issues then life would have been much easier) and their main system automates the entire quite complex order process rather than just managing it.

If its 10 servers as well with business critical applications then you need some redundancy in staffing.

[DaveB]

I have resource issue at one of my sites.

I have always gone with the rule of thumb that 1 IT staff member can cover 75 users

(agreed that all sites differ with complexity of systems supported) – there is no hard and fast rule here.
We use primarily server 2008 R2 (10 off) with 90 XP workstations and laptops) Office 2003, Exchange 2010, Dynamics CRM 2011, SQL 2008 + IBM iSeries system for ERP


Can you post here your current helpdesk/ users ratios at the sites that you work at so that I can build up a business case?

Depends what you mean by helpdesk staff. Do you mean 1st line support?

Last permie place I was at had approx 2500 users nationwide.

We had 9 Heldesk operators manning the phones and doing fixes in real time where possible. We then had another 7 Desktop techies doing 2nd line support and 5 senior techs doing 3rd line and server related stuff for the Windows environment. Another 3 were dedicated Networks and Comms support.

Add to this 4 dedicated ERP 3rd line/server support staff and around 20 business support guys doing 2nd line ERP support by business area.

Total support staff was 48 people, only 9 of which you would call Helpdesk. Over all ratio was roughly 1:52.

[Ribtickler]

I have a similar difficulty at the moment. 300 users, 400 computers 17 servers across 7 sites. 300 calls per month. 4 staff, 1.5 dedicated to project work. Infrastructure (servers/switches etc) receive little attention though. My feeling is we need two desktop tier II, one backend (tier III) and two project. Tier I isn't a biggie in our environment.