Archive for April, 2009

This has been a rough month for me at my day job. We are in the midst of rolling our existing company over to an ESOP (basically employee owned, buying out the current owners over a period of years), which has basically doubled my workload in getting the back end ready for the change over.

In addition to this we had a senior accounting executive fired, which led me to discover that our entire AR system is being handled by a series of highly customized Excel spreadsheets. When I say highly customized I mean that not only will they only work on one computer, but they will only work under one single user’s profile (which happens to be the previously mentioned, and recently departed, senior accounting executive).

This in turn led me (with the help of the accounting department) to the inevitable conclusion that our entire ERP product needs to be completely replaced. Why? Because it  is not capable of handling the volume of of a specific AR transaction we have on a daily basis without quickly locking up the server (which is how the current “Franken-Excel” system came to be in the first place).

Ok great! I’ve never liked the ERP solution we use, and have already done the research on what I would like to replace it with. After getting the current owner to sign off on it, I’ve now effectively quadrupled my workload. Oh did I mention the go live date for the new ERP system can be no later than October 1st?

Which led me to the conversation with one of the executives in our company about the fact that I need more IT staff. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind working the occasional 14-18 hour day, but when it becomes 10-12 hours every day (and at least a couple hours over the weekend) there comes a point where I would rather just not come in.

More to the point it’s a bad situation for the company. At this point my IT staff is worn kind of thin, and we are basically paralyzed. We can continue what we are doing, but doing anything more (like when the main printer goes down because you accidentally tried to print the entire Internet, or when the pr0n fiend on the third floor infests the network with spyware, and the servers start to lag because of it) is going to force one of us to stop doing something else.

In theory this is a undesirable situation, but in reality what happens is this; we have a bunch of unhappy users, and the IT staff is making decisions about what to get done based on what is least likely to get them fired if it doesn’t get done.

So keeping that in mind, the question I am asked by this executive is; what is the ideal ratio of IT Staff to Users?

Wait, what? It just doesn’t work like that (though I sincerely and truly do wish it were that easy).

Unfortunately IT is not a commodity like so many executives seem to think it is. IT work is not like filing, or data entry, unfortunately it is just not something that your average person can do (if it were I would not have a job).

And beyond that, it can’t be quantified as simple man hours either. An issue that may be a trivial five minute fix for me, may take another admin two hours to fix (or vice versa).

Which led me to the real question, how do I quantify the number of IT staff that is required for this company? Because when you cut right to the source of the issue, each and every company is going to have a different level of IT requirements based on a multitude of factors:

1. What does the company do? (a software company is going to require more IT involvement than say a restaurant)
2. How screwed up is the current IT system?
3. How screwed up are the company’s business processes?
4. What level of technical competence do the users have?

These are by no means the only factors, but they are the ones that have the biggest impact on what any given company’s ideal “IT staff to Users ratio” should be.

So what’s the answer? If I knew that I would be making Millions telling everyone how to get it right. All I can offer is this: the people making staffing decisions need to listen when their IT people tell them they need help, because the unfortunate fact of life is this; in the modern workplace (and perhaps more than any other business unit) when IT fails, the business fails.

I could list a plethora of statistics to back that up, but I just don’t have the time.