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I would say it also depends on the amount of cover you are expected to
provide under your SLA.
1 person can only cover 8 hours, and you will be without a support person
for the times when they are Sick, at Lunch or on Holiday. Covering 8am till
6pm (10 hours), 5 days a week, 52 weeks of the year is going to require at
least two people.
The amount of employees you need also depends on the state of the network.
Old equipment requires more work than new. Non-standard equipment is also
the same.
We have found that locking down the workstation builds a little, and keeping
them all the same specification allows us to reduce staffing levels. Of
course automating everything from creating profiles to installing printers
on the desktop has to be done too. If a PC breaks or get corrupt we simply
put a new one on the desk, and rebuild/repair the old one during a free
moment.
We have one desktop person to approx 80-100 employees plus one floating
level 2 and one level 3 to cover 6 offices. The floating engineers helps
cover during sickness/holiday and busy times. Third line support also covers
project work. In our case: Third line includes LAN/WAN, Server and desktop
knowledge, second is desktop/server, and first is desktop only. Our team has
just one first and one third line (me) - The rest are second.
At the end of the day, I would suggest the amount of required staff depends
on the SLA. If you have your own IT employees, they should consider the
business as their client, and the SLA should be at a level that can work. If
it doesn't matter that some-one is always there then maybe one engineer will
do the job, but if they want some-one there at the drop of a hat you will
need more staff.
Si.
Third line engineer.
_____
From: Rami.Prescott@frostbank.com [mailto:Rami.Prescott@frostbank.com]
Sent: 25 October 2005 21:32
To: security-management@securityfocus.com
Subject: IT Department Size
Would anyone know of a good place to find information on how large a system
administrator/ network engineering department should be?
The general rule of thumb I've heard is 1 system administrator/network
engineer for every 250 users. Is this generally true in practice?
We define system administrator/network engineer as someone who has 5-10
years experience in all OS and who is responsible for the operating system
and hardware.
Thank you,
Rami Prescott
IT Audit
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