Performance Measurement
Best of 2009: IT Department Staff Sizes – How Many Is Too Many?
0I am taking a week of vacation. Today’s post is a Best of 2009 Post. It celebrates some of the best content from the site based upon user feedback and analytics. It was originally posted on this day. I hope that you enjoy it!
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This post is the story of two of my customers. The first is constantly complaining that their information technology (IT) Department is too large and that they need to trim people to cut costs. The other continuously bemoans the fact that they cannot fill their IT vacancies, needs more people than the market will bear, and wishes that they could find bodies to permit their expansion. The strange factor is that they are both in the same industry, market, and approximately the same total organization size. How can this be?
This weird dichotomy is very prevalent in my experience in the field. There is simply no agreed upon rules of thumb or metrics for how many staff it takes to meet the needs of an information based group. If you look online you find similar companies with one tech per hundred total size, ratios of 1:400, and even 1:25. We, as a profession, are simply all over the map on this one,
Part of the problem is that people define their IT Departments size in different ways. This is a critical difference in the ratios. Almost all companies include their help desk, seat hands-on service, and technical troubleshooters. I like to include with these teams management, IT financial services, information assurance / security, back office / server farm administration, and seat service technical plus non-technical administration. The challenge question is whether you count telephone operators and technicians, video teleconferencing support, cellular phone management, etc. in your numbers. My compromise is to include everyone who reports to the CIO / IT Department Head for simplicity.
The other issue is how to you ground your metric. If you use seats, you need to define it. Does a seat mean one computer, one user account, or one server to computer link? Also, do your seats include cellular phones, Blackberries, and VOIP? If you base it on staff size, how many machines do they touch per day? A little thinking can go a long way here.
Since I frequently get called on to make recommendations and justifications for staff size changes, both up and down, I try to keep on top of the issue on line. Here are some fantastic links to discussions and white papers on the topic of rules of thumb for IT Staff Sizes:
- TechRepublic.com – IT Staff Ratio
- TechRepublic.com – Deciding the proper user/IT Support ratio
- TechRepublic.com – What is a reasonable end user/tech support ratio?
- Mark Verber – How Many Administrators are Enough?
- ArticleBase.com – Solutions for Staffing the it Department
- Tek-Tips.com – Ideal Users to IT staff
- SpiceWorks.com – What is your ratio? How many users per Tech support personnel?
- Petri IT Knowledgebase – How many IT people are in your org? or What’s your IT person to user ratio?
- Slashdot.org – Ratio of IT Department Workers To Overall Employees?
If you are curious, this is the rule of thumb that I use for staff sizing. It is completely based upon my experiences and has no scientific backing. It does seem to be validated to some extent by the reports and stories in links above. Remember, I count the entire IT / Information Services Department when I do this. I recommend one person for every seventy-five seats that are serviced. I define a seat as one computer with less than four user accounts on it adding one for each server that needs to be actively administered. I find that if you are within plus or minus 10% of this ratio, you are best positioned to take advantage of the benefits of information technology as a competitive enhancement.
Be careful though…One counter-intuitive fact in this matter is that it is just as bad to be over manned as under manned in my experience. When you get under manned you obviously feel like your company has information friction – computers are down, networks are slow, and security is suspect. However, if you allow your IT Department to get too big, then your information bureaucracy starts to get in the way of your agility just as badly. This is the land of blocked ports, overly locked down setups, and endless waits for approval to do anything new or different with your systems. Your IT Department can become its own worst nightmare for your company if you let it expand too far.
I think that, as a profession, we need to focus on this area from an academic standpoint more. There is real work to be done here to set standards for us all. While every organization is different, they are not that different. We should have agreed upon rules of thumb and guidelines to reference.
What ratio does your organization perform best at? What is your current ratio? Do you know of any other links, rules of thumb, or discussions on this topic. Please share your resources for us all.
That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for December 30, 2009.
Happy New Year to you and your loved ones. Don’t forget that our Amazon Holiday Store is still open and a great way to support the site!
Information Technology Strategic Goal Alignment
0This week, I am discussing some core concepts of Information Technology Enterprise Management Success. I have written on various topics like this before as part of my IT Management Tools and Productivity series.
As I said earleir in the week here and here, though I stray far and wide in my management consultant product usage, I do find myself frequently coming back to one that I learned from FranklinCovey. Monday, I wrote about their concept for goal making that they call Wildly Important Goals or WIGs. It is part of their The 4 Disciplines of Execution™ organizational consulting program. On Tuesday, I wrote about their second discipline in this series which is to make compelling scoreboards to inform the workforce on how you are doing
Their third discipline is that lofty goals made at the corporate level must get broken down into smaller and smaller, executable portions through a process called alignment. Here I break with their methods and choose instead to use those of an alternate program called The Balanced Scorecard approach.
One of my all time favorite IT Management Tools is Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard (BSC). I find that it provides a very effective means for integrating the goals and objectives of the Chief Information Officer and IT Services Departments into the overall construct of their business.
Wikipedia has a great article on BSC. This is how they summarize it:
“The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is a strategic performance management tool for measuring whether the smaller-scale operational activities of a company are aligned with its larger-scale objectives in terms of vision and strategy.
By focusing not only on financial outcomes but also on the operational, marketing and developmental inputs to these, the Balanced Scorecard helps provide a more comprehensive view of a business, which in turn helps organizations act in their best long-term interests. This tool is also being used to address business response to climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.
Organizations were encouraged to measure, in addition to financial outputs, those factors which influenced the financial outputs. For example, process performance, market share / penetration, long term learning and skills development, and so on.”
The Balanced Scorecard Institute is another great references with pages of information available to read online.
Kaplan and Norton were professors at the Harvard Business School when they wrote the initial book on the subject. Following its success they founded the Palladium Group to specialize in consulting associated with executing the BSC methodology in real organizations. The Palladium Group offers consulting, training, and education services to enable full implementation. You can certainly learn a lot about the techniques by reading the growing library of books that the team has written on the subject.
It is a little difficult to explain the effectiveness of the BSC method in a small blog post, but it can have transformational benefits for your group. Essentially, it is a process by which you translate your organization’s highest goals into executable, measurable, and correctable action steps. Best of all, since it facilitates goal accomplishment in the financial, people, customers, and learning it prevents business thought that ignores the typical competitive advantages and value inputs from information technology. It also applies equally well to public, private, non-profit, and governmental organizations and I find it to be one of the few business performance management tools that functions equally well when profit is not the driving factor.
The Deposit Insurance Corporation of Ontario has a wonderful website demonstrating their Balanced Scorecard implementation. You can click here to see an example of one of their scorecards at full browser resolution.
If you are looking for an effective, business proven, academically sound method for aligning your IT and CIO shops with the overall objectives of your organization, I recommend you give the Balanced Scorecard method a serious look. I have seen it used effectively for a number of IT organizations.
Tell me what you think of this series. Please suggest IT Management Tools that you have found effective. Have you used or seen used this one before?
That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for December 3, 2009 ©Scott Coughlin
Poll: Who Runs Strategy For Your Organization
0Today, our Information Thought of the Day (ITTOD) is a poll subject. It is based upon feedback that I got from yesterday’s post about using the Balanced Scorecard. It was the first in a new series about different business management tools and their applicability to the IT Profession.
The question that came up was who in the organization is responsible for executing the strategy of the organization. There are many choices selected by top 100 IT companies. I have chosen the most common ones from my experience for your selection. Tell me who runs it for your team:
Loading ...I will be sure to share the results.
Do you like polls as a daily topic? Do you have a recommended one for another week? Please let me know.
That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for August 12, 2009 ©Scott Coughlin .