This is a topic that may be rather political but it related to system administration still...how many people do you have supporting your users in your IT department? We have three people supporting something near 1500 systems and around 2400 people and a recent question was raised about why we have long times to get systems replaced, repaired, work orders fulfilled, etc. along with the system admin duties of maintaining the servers (mail, proxy, filters, VOIP, wireless, backup, etc.)
Does anyone have numbers on what the "best practices" average is of support people to employees in an organization?
EDIT:...from some of the answers that are appearing I'm starting to feel depressed...
I would say that the ratio is about right when things get done in a reasonable amount of time, where "reasonable" is defined by management. If you're the one managing the IT department there, you get to balance the budget for the department against the users who complain that things aren't getting done fast enough. If not, then someone else has apparently decided that the needs of your users isn't as important as keeping the books in the black.
But you want to know our ratio? I'm the single IT person in a company of 8 people, including 3 part timers. We have 11 servers. Our networking and server hosting is done entirely by a partner company. We're an ISP/VoIP telco with about 5000 users, plus who knows how many server hosting customers.
There's probably no general answer. It depends on the environment that has to be maintained (Specialized servers? Fat or thin client? Special software that needs extra attention?), and on how much is outsourced (network infrastructure, sw installation, electrical wiring, helpdesk duties ...).
To give some ideas:
In my company, we have 3 IT people for a staff of about twenty, but that's because our IT people also work for our customers.
For purely inhouse IT, I've seen rations of 10 IT for 300 employees. 1:30 or 1:50 seems about right for general desktop and some light server administration (mail server, file server) plus a bit of help-desk work.
At any rate, 3 IT for 1500 users seems far too little, unless you outsource almost everything (or your users fix most problems themselves :-P).
3 admins to 1500 systems? I have some bad news for you. You are not supporting 1500 systems.
Your users are supporting their systems. You are supporting the servers, network infrastructure, and helping them out a bit with their systems.
Ratios don't really matter. You need adequate teams in place to handle different sets of tasks that complement each other. I define an adequate team as 3-4 individuals. You also need to establish career paths.
I say ratios don't matter, because you can operate simple environments easily. I worked at a company with a 1,200 agent call center Example for a mid-sized place:
The complexities and things that matter to your company drives the need for more specialization and more staff.
Examples:
Perfection doesn't exist, so how you approach things depends on how much money you have, the leadership you have in place, etc. Without good leaders, growing the staff will make things worse.
On the other hand, your staff as it is described is inadequate. I cannot imagine how crappy your life is with those kind of demands.
Our overall IT staff is about 65 people supporting 450 internal users, 12,000 external users, 500 servers & network-based devices (not including printers), and 1000 desktops.
Of the 65:
We have around 2,300 members of staff, of which 1,800 use PC's on a regular basis. We also support over 400 servers.
We have 50 permenent members of staff in the "Operations" department who support the servers, desktops, data and voice links, databases etc. (of which 9 are managers or team leaders). Most of the major line-of-business application support is within a different department with over 100 staff.
And we're busy. Very busy.
Most of the user and business support stuff gets done on time but we struggle with project work both internal stuff like upgrades and supporting major business projects.
So yes, I'd say you're doing well.
I have seen 1:25 to 1:50 as the norm in the corporate world. For smaller companies - it tends towards the 1:25 ratio, and for larger companies towards 1:50. That includes all internal IT support staff (developers, managers, help desk, etc). It does NOT include people working on the revenue producing side (developers at software company).
As a consultant I have seen a broad variety of ratios: Usually 1:40 or better for small and mid-sized companys seems to work out just fine (larger projects and non-IT related work gets done too). In bigger companies (and I consider 1500 systems "bigger") there is usually a smaller ratio because the it staff benefits from standardized hardware and support-procedures. I've seen 1:100 and on a rare occasion 1:200 as ratio but none as radical as your 1:500... It could work with local (1st level) support or students/interns which solve all the small problems - but it's no surprise to me, that you have a very slow reaction time with a 1:500 ratio.
At my company it's just me and I'm only a software developer with about 30 people total. It's been quite an experience to walk into being the domain admin aside from being a developer.
I walked into a fully setup network and we do alot of 3rd party hosting for software and our website so alot of that brunt work is shouldered by others. We buy our machines rolled from dell so I have very minimal work in setting up new clients.
At some point I really will need to get a network security team consultant to come look over everything because the security side is definitely my biggest weakness.
I suspect you are understaffed because you're asking and you've got response time issues. It depends wildly on how you're counting IT people to users. Are you counting desktop support? Or just server administrators? 30 to 50 to 1 for all technology staff is pretty normal for what I've seen, but that includes DBAs, Support Desk, Networking, Network Security, Web folks, developers, etc...
Here we have a lot of very diverse servers running a bunch of sort of high maintence applications so we have 7 sysadmins, and 2 dbas, for about 320 servers. Which is probably a bit high. On the other hand our response times are great and we are very flexable about what we can provide for response to users. There are also 20k users, and probably 40 odd client services people to deal with them.