Are we understaffed?
Posted by bigmac______@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 245 comments
We’ve got around 1,600 users and an IT team of 8. Here’s how we’re set up:
- IT Manager: 1
- IT Leads: 2 (Helpdesk + Systems)
- Helpdesk: 2
- Systems/Projects: 2 (I’m here)
- Hybrid (Helpdesk/Systems): 1
On average, helpdesk handles about 75–100 tickets a week, everything from simple password resets to really complex issues.
I’m on the systems side, but honestly, I’m starting to worry about burnout on the helpdesk team. A big challenge is that we’re dealing with BYOD devices, so nothing is standardized. That makes troubleshooting unpredictable and sometimes really complex. On top of that, there’s always the risk of causing damage to personal devices, which could turn into a liability issue for the company.
We also use a tool that goes pretty deep into the local device. When it breaks, it’s rarely a quick fix. You’re digging into root causes, doing trial and error, and hoping experience kicks in. There is vendor support, but as usual, that can take days, with log collection, RCA, calls, and so on. Meanwhile, users who are client-facing can’t afford downtime. Since this tool is part of our security controls, not using it isn’t really an option either.
I’ve got a bunch of ideas that could help improve things, but I’m not really in a position to implement them. I’ve shared some with my manager, but it feels like they’re stretched thin, and the ideas don’t really gain traction. I also feel like some of these process improvements should be driven more from the helpdesk side.
I really do think that adding more helpdesk IT is the more immediate solution here.
Most of our users are VAs supporting different clients, so the demand is pretty constant.
Curious to hear from others, what’s a healthy helpdesk to user ratio in setups like this?
Beginning_Ad1239@reddit
It really depends. How many of those users are frontline and never touch any IT equipment? You can have 10,000 employees that never touch an IT system except to look at their paycheck so raw count isn't that important. If they all sit at a computer you're massively understaffed.
There_Bike@reddit
Are you getting what you need to done? If yes, then no, you aren’t understaffed. If no, then yes, you are understaffed.
Why is this such a hard concept for folks?
talmorus@reddit
I'm 1500 staff, 600+ devices and 86 locations by myself.
Send help. Lol
Far-Bug8297@reddit
100 tickets a week for 1600 people, either ur users stopped asking or u run the tightest ship ive ever seen
Bowlen000@reddit
That seems more than fine for 100 tickets a week. My team services maybe 5000 users. We have 8-9 engineers doing this. About 1800 tickets a month.
They’re about 80% utilised.
I’d be focussing on efficiency and whether they’re utilising their time well.
Stonewalled9999@reddit
your team is too small bud, way too small
neoh4x0r@reddit
Yeah, 8 people in IT serving 1600 clients....that's an average of 200 clients per IT staff.
According to this workforce.com report -- the staffing ratios should be no more than 1 IT staff member per about 50 employees (this is for 10,000+ employees)...they have 4 times the recommended amount.
So the IT staff needs to have about 32 people to handle all 1600 clients.
Total_Job29@reddit
What!?!
100 employees in IT! They get 100 tickets a week so each IT person would be handling 1 ticket a week.
Or if we drop to 32 that is still 3 tickets a week.
It’s fairly typical to have around 1:100 or even 1:200 depending on complexity of the organisation.
Given they have 100 tickets a week the above ratios are 8-16 IT employees they are at 8 but could probably justify an extra head or two or three depending on the technical debt. But suggesting it should be up to 100 people is madness.
Evs91@reddit
lol - who does the projects, implementations, documentation, and project management stuff? Surely that is all not being put in your ticketing system a only 100 tickets a week. We have 2 helpdesk and a helpdesk manager for 300 employees. plus the 5 for systems admin, 4 for infosec, and the 5 developers , and the various department experts for (specific) application support and config. It's too lean for us some days.
Total_Job29@reddit
So do you think it’s reasonable to go from 8 people to 100?
Evs91@reddit
I think that it broadly depends on the business you are running. The workforce.com article is a bit of a stretch for a reference "ideal" though. This is just a report of staffing ratios by firms not if they are performing well or not. I'm also not really sure where the 1:50 is coming from or the 1:100 or 1:200 you reference. Could it be reasonable to go to 100 staff: sure. You could probably use 2-4 more for helpdesk at least. then if there is a backlog of enterprise projects a few more infosec and infrastructure employees can help speed up implementation times. dedicated project managers help move along things. Curiously the workforce.com article above also has a second table which seems to indicate that a different metric determines staffing levels.
Total_Job29@reddit
So if we are talking to the specifics posted in this thread.
OP posted their context 8 people, 75-100 tickets a week, simple to complex, 2 direct help desk plus really up to 5ish people covering tickets and the others covering other aspects. Beginning to worry about burn out.
Someone plugged those numbers in to get 100 IT people needed. Growing the team 1150% and I said that was clearly not correct.
Yes for other circumstances it could be that those sorts of numbers are justified (but I really doubt they’d be starting at 8 people in that situation. They might be at 80 and need 100).
In this case the person suggested something purely from an external benchmark without thinking about the context given and the outcome of the number.
It would lead to a £4-£7m opex increase from just the headcount. That could easily be the entire profit wiped out.
sir_sq@reddit
My view on this is that the number of tickets doesn't mean anything : it depends on the company, and a ticket at Company A isn't worth the same as a ticket at Company B. It depends on everything else : the documentation, the existing infrastructure, the number of service providers, and the level of independence of the IT department, etc.
Total_Job29@reddit
Yeah but at the 100 people in IT with 100 tickets would be 1 ticket a week which includes simple tickets like password resets.
1 person in IT would spend 2 minutes on a ticket and then 39hours and 58 minutes to spare.
Hashrunr@reddit
Ticket numbers are useless without context.
Total_Job29@reddit
Yes obviously.
However the context is there both in the OP message and I also included an example in my post you are replying to.
Do you think that an IT person handling 1 simple password request a week is a sign of an appropriately sized team?
The helpdesk has 2 people in it currently handling 50 tickets a week. And the suggestion in this discussion thread is that the IT team is increased to 100 people.
If the ratios of the team was kept consistent then then help desk would go to 25.
The suggestion was to increase the IT team by 1150%
It’s just such an obviously wrong result.
The context
Org size 1600 100 tickets a week IT team of 8 - two in help desk Tickets range from simple password resets to more complex I’m starting to worry about burnout
None of that says ‘the place is on fire we are 1000s of tickets behind, everyone is working 16 hour days, things are breaking constantly, we have high rate of churn of IT staff’
Simply plugging in 1600 staff members into a ratio and coming out with 100 IT people is so obviously wrong. The context matters and the context shows it is wrong.
It’s so wrong that anyone raising it inside the company if they were senior would have their decision making severely questioned as it’s not even worth a conversation with how wrong it is.
Hey CEO can we increase our company wide headcount 6%. That’s not a two way conversation. Thats a no.
Hashrunr@reddit
Calm down dude. Obviously an IT person handling 1 simple password request a week is not realistic. Straw man arguments help nobody. OPs post doesn't have enough context to say if they are understaffed or overstaffed for 75-100 tickets per week. We have no details about the environment or the types of tickets they're dealing with. Ticket numbers don't mean anything. I handle 0-3 tickets per week as a senior engineer. Without context around those tickets and the project work I do, ticket numbers are meaningless.
Total_Job29@reddit
It clearly has enough context
I’m beginning to worry about burn out We have 8 members of staff We get 75-100 tickets a week Tickets are simple password reset to complex
They have a team of 8 with 2 directly on helpdesk but 5ish probably handling direct tickets.
With that as the context going to 100 people in IT?
It’s not a strawman arguement at all, it’s based on the numbers the OP gave and what the person was suggesting.
They get 100 tickets and they’ll have 100 members of staff. Ergo 1 ticket per IT member of staff a week - or 2-3.
However because of your experience in your company this might seem reasonable but based on the context given it is such clearly so outlandish it just shouldn’t be given the time of day.
neoh4x0r@reddit
Well 1 ticket per person per week, but they wouldn't be sitting idle as that surely isn't the only job in IT.
Old-Flight8617@reddit
It's not life it isn't changing everyday. Also it's not like random things break and you also have to have dedicated personal for some services.
fuckedfinance@reddit
Yeah, but that is still way too many people. That's just asking to be tasked with taking over facilities shit.
50 at that level is probably still too many, but a more reasonable number when you take maintenance, continuing ed, and projects into account with time to spare for crisis situations.
Old-Flight8617@reddit
But that's literally all it. HD --> infra. And everything in between.
neoh4x0r@reddit
Not to mention cross-training between different roles and other departments.
Total_Job29@reddit
You are asking for a 6% increase in the company headcount.
Yes you can find work for those people but it may not matter as that might kill the company’s profit margin.
It is going from 8 to 100 people. It is not a sensible suggestion and trying to justify it is not sensible.
If yoy are a senior in any company I’d suggestion you do not bring this conversation up and try and justify it. It will be a career limiting conversation as your decision making will be questioned and then all other cost impacting decision could start to be tackled.
fuckedfinance@reddit
Right.
My company has a lot (relatively speaking), but most of them are on the security side due to the type of work we do. Taking that out, we'd be closer to 1:100 with time to spare.
OneSeaworthiness7768@reddit
If you’re talking just people handling user support issues. But outside of that it very much depends on the org. My company is ~2300 users with an IT operations department of somewhere around 100. The majority of them are not handling tickets or helping users.
Total_Job29@reddit
They have 8 and the suggestion was going to 100 people.
Come on that’s just not sensible.
Trying to discuss nuance isn’t even worth it with such a ridiculous suggestion.
FrivolousMe@reddit
No, a small team of L1 techs would handle those tickets while other IT staff would handle bigger tickets and projects. It's not an entire team of simple help desk people ..
Total_Job29@reddit
They have 8 people currently.
The person is suggesting they go to 100.
If we say they go from 2 in helpdesk to 4. You now have 88 people extra to do other projects.
Sorry it’s just so obviously wrong on the face of it and with the context and description the OP gave.
Go to your CEO and ask for a company wide headcount count of 6% based on the OPs description and see how quickly the no comes back.
There is simply (no internal to the team) justification to go from 8 to 100 or even 8 to 30.
The only justification would be executive we are changing the strategy or we are assigning the role of the current IT team to include x, y, or z now (business transformation, special projects, strategic development etc).
It’s not ‘I’m starting to worry about burnout’
waddlesticks@reddit
I might add this here instead of the other guy since hopefully it expands what you wrote, but ticket numbers mean absolutely jack shit. Always hated when places used it as a metric of "if you're doing work or not". They're good to use for stats to find the most common ticket, or most common users but a metric for performance on whether you need more people or not is a poor way.
Some tickets are just there to be a quick "I did a thing" sometimes you're told not to log tickets for specific jobs because they aren't "ticket worthy". Then you have the fact that sure, there's 100 tickets a week, but 25 of those took an hour/hour+ each and could be tickets from a month ago of ongoing issues that are taking a lot of man hours to actually solve.
Stonewalled9999@reddit
I did two tickets last week. One of them took four days and helped four sites get working because our NOC screwed up the data center so if you just see a ticket count, it looks like I did nothing.
rosseloh@reddit
And in contrast, I closed out like 50 offboarding tickets this week (parent ticket and several children tickets per offboarding).
All of them were about 30 seconds work double checking that the person in question indeed did not have an account and I could run the script to close them all in three clicks.
So yeah, the number means basically nothing.
TheMysticalDadasoar@reddit
I closed 30 tickets after I needed to reboot a firewall and forgot to put the RMM platform in maintenance mode for the servers behind it
That contrasts to the 4 "actual" tickets I closed last week
Good for the stats, but nothing more
waddlesticks@reddit
Sounds about right, I'm on the side of ticket quality over quantity. Since trying for quantity leads to worse service (it just incentivises quicker ticket closures that may only baindaid an issue, or even just hide it till the next ticket is in).
Use the tickets to measure issues going around, not the workers. If users aren't actively complaining about the service in a reputable way, then that's the metric that actually matters.
Ssakaa@reddit
02:00 Saturday Morning, ticket update: "Please provide logs."
03:00 Saturday Morning, ticket update: "Please provide logs."
04:00 Saturday Morning, ticket update: "Please provide logs."
05:00 Saturday Morning, ticket update: "Ticket closed due to lack of response."
Typical MS "support" flow...
lineskicat14@reddit
Yep, also depends on the user base. Is it a tech company or a finance company? Is IT allowed to empower users to Google how to work on their own systems (rare), or do they have to hand-hold them through everything (common). Is the IT department generally left to do just their job (never) or are they asked to cover other areas, such as the one time the bathroom had a toilet leak (yep, this happened).
The expectations given to the IT team really has a huge impact. If you can get some management who can effectively push back, you can focus on the tickets that truly need IT'S help.
waddlesticks@reddit
Pretty much! S
I'm 100% on the side of empowerment of users in the form of self service. One of the key things I hear from them is they really don't want to disturb IT or have to call for something that takes us 5 minutes to do. Taken years but the company I'm contracted at is moving a little towards that now after I've been pestering for it.
Downside is they decided to do it because of AI and it's just absolute ass so I think that'll be dead in the water (they want a lot of information in it that makes it give the most incorrect answers for something as simple as a password reset even when it's forced to only use one note).
One day management will listen, but I think the problem is bonuses get in the way for a lot of it these days (oh executives want this cool new thing in business so let's tie that to people's bonuses. That's a great bloody recipe)
Total_Job29@reddit
It wasn’t the only number though.
They gave organisation size. IT team size. Number of tickets.
And context of Some simple some complex I’m starting to worry about burnout.
None of that is ‘We are 1000s of tickets behind and drowning’
You’d need that to get anywhere remotely close to we need to increase IT head count by 1150%.
The mere suggestion that moving from 8 to 100 people is so obviously wrong for that company.
Yes ticket count alone is not a good metric. And actually the above conversation was actually based on ratio of IT:Headcount and not ticket number.
The ticket number conversation was becuase the suggestion would mean that they’d be working on 1 ticket a week which would include simple password resets.
It is so obviously wrong on the face of it based on the conversation context and numbers.
Ssakaa@reddit
The quality of IT and how often people say "fuck it" and avoid putting in tickets by making a horrible mess of things and letting it stew forever in shadow IT land.
awkwardnetadmin@reddit
Another good observation. If tickets languish for too long it encourages shadow IT. At some point people become cynical that tickets will get received so why bother?
Fit-Parsnip-8109@reddit
Right? Tickets are the tip of the iceberg where I am.
Ssakaa@reddit
If you have a 100 person IT team, you're not just helpdesk. When you get to larger org, there's a lot of project, maintenance, and application/system work that isn't braindead ticket jockey work. I would suspect that 100 count includes more traditional sysadmins, management, infosec, IaM, possibly even some dedicated governance and compliance folks depending on the industry. Maybe a third in direct end user support facing work, and that includes both helpdesk/deskside support and endpoint management roles.
Granted, 100 tickets a week at 1600 people also isn't terrible, but... I suspect that's a product of a shitload of shadow IT going on there hiding the real amount, not a lack of work that needs done.
Total_Job29@reddit
I’m a CISO and worked at companies of 100 people to 100,000+ people and many sizes in between. I know what IT team are like and how they are so varied across roles, responsibilities, who is actually classed as IT and not etc.
But this is a simple simple simple case.
They have 8 and the person suggested they go to 100.
That is so obviously wrong. They put a number into a ratio without considering the context, and what the output was telling them.
A 1150% increase in headcount is just not a sensible suggestion and you have to be clear in thinking in management to know when an answer is an obvious no so you can move on to questions that are yes.
Ssakaa@reddit
Ok.
So this was just complete bullshit and you knew it? Great. Good chat.
Total_Job29@reddit
What are you chatting about? It’s hardly bullshit. It was such such a gross over estimation of moving from 8 to 100 that such a large scaling means any point becomes a general one. And if you look at the OPs context they have 5 ish of 8 people assigned to help desk so 50 people handling 75-100 tickets. Really if that’s 1 ticket a week or 2 tickets a week per person hardly ‘bullshit’.
You need to understand that managers/senior managers/ execs don’t care if a number like this is 1 or 2 or even 5. It’s clear what the implications are.
If you can’t understand it and simply class it as ‘bullshit’ then be prepared to be continuously frustrated by execs making decisions. Learn how and what these sorts of conversations need to be able to move them forward.
Everyone has been trying to justify how it ‘could’ be for their use case or specific circumstances etc. When having a 100 tickets a week with a 100 IT staff meaning 1-2 tickets for the helpdesk team.
The other elements of IT work is being handled and actually having so much more on that side would become a big business constraint as they’d be pulling resource from other teams to get projects moving etc.
neoh4x0r@reddit
I just based the numbers on the survey results from the link I posted -- things will vary wildly between companies because one-size does not fit all, but those are allegedly the typical/average ratios (1 IT person to X employees).
Total_Job29@reddit
And that’s the problem no application.l of context. They are 8 currently, and suggesting they need to be 100 is lunacy and would be career limiting if you brought that up to management they would contrast your decision making going forward.
To suddenly increase the company wide head count 6%. That’s the whole company wide head count increase.
Or just IT it is 1150% increase.
At some point when looking at outside references you have to consider the context of the organisation you are looking at. 1150% increase in IT staff and moving each person in IT to handle 1 ticket a week is just so obviously wrong that any discussion would be dropped so quickly.
neoh4x0r@reddit
Hey /u/Total_Job29 how about stop being a jerk. You can express your opinion without needing to keep on repeating it over and over again.
FarToe1@reddit
Agree - and IME, this has too many variables to pin a single figure to.
What level of support users need depends a lot on their job. Basic connectivity and office tools are a baseline, but then there's a lot of users who need support for more specialised IT roles - programmers, statisticians and so on.
OneSeaworthiness7768@reddit
Not all IT employees are user support or handling tickets. I assume the number that person is referencing must be across all of IT and not just user support.
Total_Job29@reddit
Yes and that’s the problem with just taking an outside reference number and blindly applying it without considering the question and context of the current position and what the answer means.
In this case the answer meant the person was suggesting that the IT team would be increased by 1150%.
It’s just obviously wrong to the situation that the OP described.
nwmcsween@reddit
Because IT isn't just about fixing user issues, IT can be about innovative projects that bring productivity for the entire organization, at least long long ago it was where a lot of R&D happened.
Total_Job29@reddit
Yes but come on be sensible.
8 people to 100 people! = 1150% increase
That is just so obviously not sensible even 8 people to 30 is the same.
Any discussion for those sorts of head count increases would be a strategic decision from the company to do x, y, or z as new ventures etc.
It’s not and never would be a decision based on those number because ‘IT’ was understaffed for what we currently do.
Any discussion on this basis to move to those head counts would be career limiting if you were a senior person in that organisation.
unprovoked33@reddit
You need people across a wide variety of roles, running projects and keeping everything up to date and organized, not just working tickets. With fewer IT employees you get growing tech debt and security holes. A more robust IT department also provides efficiency gains to other departments. Just looking at tickets is the wrong way to view IT. We aren’t just a cost center, we provide actual value to employees and the company.
A company with a strong IT department is a sign of good place to work. A company with bare-bones IT is almost always a bad place to work.
Total_Job29@reddit
Yeah I know that’s why I talked about tech debt but to balloon a department from 8 to 100 is madness and there is no way anyone would or could justify it. Even going to 30 would be the same.
Simply put if anyone proposed that to management you’d get laughed out of the room or politely asked to leave and then laughed at behind the back.
You’d lose all credibility as a decision maker.
tharunduil@reddit
I mean. Im working at an MSP and run 1000 endpoints with another 20 servers by myself. Had 20 tickets this week and tons of free time. 8 people for 1600 should be more than enough for tickets and projects.
Techguyyyyy@reddit
I’d argue this model is becoming quickly outdated because AI is forcing teams to work with less people. I’m not saying OP is staffed appropriately but we are in new times and there is no perfect formula. All I can say is executives are pushing for teams to reduce staff while being able to do more while leveraging AI. The quickest way I can see that happens is most service desk/help desk teams will be automated at some point and end users will depend on agents to answer their questions.
neoh4x0r@reddit
That's already happening now. Most customers will have to go through an automated chatbot before things get escalated up to a real person.
Techguyyyyy@reddit
It seems viable tbh. Our helpdesk is notorious for leaning on easy tickets like password resets and other very simple tickets. You’ll ask them what they did all week and 10 out of 30 tickets are something that takes less than 5 minutes to solve and close. I’m much more interested in having our helpdesk do more critical work.
neoh4x0r@reddit
Yes, take away the "busy" work so you can focus on the more important things.
However, that can be a double-edged sword when you don't have enough high-level work to justify paying people to keep a seat warm.
Tonyluo2001@reddit
lol. My company has 6000+ staff with 78 IT, half of which are managers and VP that barely do anything other than meetings and BS.
IMongoose@reddit
Me in k12 education: 20 IT staff for 10,000 users is pretty good.
Stonewalled9999@reddit
Different animal. Schools have weekends and breaks and summers to do big projects and often get BOCES and outside support. When I worked as a school I was bored and actually paid fairly well since it was tier 4 NY state benefits
awkwardnetadmin@reddit
Honestly, the size of the organization may be less relevant than the type of organization on the "right" ratio. If you have a complex infrastructure relative to the employee count you may need a larger IT headcount. Also depending upon what functions you outsourced to a vendor you have have fewer internal IT staff. There are a lot of variables involved.
pinkycatcher@reddit
That IT metric almost assuredly includes business systems specialists
TerrorToadx@reddit
That is delusional thinking honestly. OP is understaffed but this is bullshit lol
cultvignette@reddit
That feels about right.
I'm on a team of 5 to handle 500ish, but I alone am in a hybrid role responsible for about 50. Just this year it grew to 70. The strain has been felt.
Unusual-Biscotti687@reddit
Heh. We've got 3 SD, 2 Field Services and 4 Infrastructure.
5000 end users over 100+ sites.
Stonewalled9999@reddit
I’ll drink a bottle for you fellow warrior
progenyofeniac@reddit
Worked at a place about that size with at least 3x if not 4x as many. Far more specialized roles etc. Not sure how you guys keep the wheels from falling off.
flatulating_ninja@reddit
Its sounds leaps better than the shit show I just left. I was hired as a Systems/Projects and the only other IT was the director for a company of over 1000 employees and an office in all four US mainland time zones. All we did was tickets and on/off boarding. We were in Colorado and by the time I got in there were at least a dozen tickets waiting from the Florida and Texas offices. I was completing 100-120 tickets a week myself in addition to handling all devices setups, and at least four on or off boardings a week. There were so many projects I found needed to be done in the first month I was there but there was zero time to do it. The Director refused to admit we we understaffed.
Evs91@reddit
So when one of the helpdesk staff goes on vacation and the other has a protected life event i.e. FMLA, sick leave, etc who covers those 100 tickets?
prady87@reddit
Your team is small, but not having an standard for devices makes everything even harder
McDoubleDaTrouble@reddit
We have the same amount of users but an IT team of about 60.
Abject_Serve_1269@reddit
Eh could be worse. Im the 2nd help desk hire on a now 3 man help deskn team supporting over 1200 Corp and over 20 stores.
Its a big cluster fuck sonce there's a lot for them to do so im just learning their environment to get boots on floor ajd go with it.
BeyondRAM@reddit
600 users here: 1 Manager, 2 Sys admin, 1 Helpdesk (intern), 100-150 tickets per month. Seems like the BYOD is your main issue here
Kallikasa@reddit
Bus factor? Or what you do when you helpdesk on PTO? Also you highly possible ignoring important tasks (security? License management? )
bigmac______@reddit (OP)
hate to admit it but you're right. i think it will just get worse and worse unless a big setup change happens.
EricSec@reddit
IT team size depends heavily on the type of company and how many systems you manage. Do you work for a company where everyone works on a computer all day?
dccjaday@reddit
Yeah - understaffed for sure. But I see another problem. You have 8 staff members and 3 of them are essentially management. What do the 2 IT leads do? If they're not handling their full share of the tickets, that's even worse. With a team that small, the manager (should be the only one) needs to be either doing tickets, or working on hiring. You're all riding the burnout train for sure. Good luck!
huskyvarnish@reddit
14,000 employees across sites across the US. Each field support has normally 2-3 states and 400-500 users. Corporate office has ~3,000 employees, and less than 8 helpdesk employees. So understaffed that corporate is now forcing remote field support to work corporate helpdesk. Yes, you’re understaffed, but you’re not alone.
uraaga@reddit
Severely understaffed. What would happen if two of you are on vacation or out sick?
CertifiableX@reddit
Seems about right. We have about 2300 employees, and our help desk has 3 people. They escalate to our techs (3), and then to our systems team (they focus on projects, team of 4) or to our applications team (8, techs and admins of out ERP, EMRs, and other apps). The help desk works on about 50-70 tickets per week each. It’s pretty manageable for our non-profit with multiple verticals (health care, residential, education, transportation, and admin).
lukesidgreaves@reddit
Ooft, I'm here with 6500 users on 18 different sites, with 7 of us!
Averaged 4 of us over the past 10 years, but happy to now have 3 additional employees as of last September.
For context we are 18 schools under a MAT in UK. Approx 1000 staff and 5500 pupils.
But in those 10 years we've centralised and modernised absolutely everything (servers, network, print, telephony, AV, monitoring, Windows/iOS/macOS/Android/ChromeOS MDM, security, help desk, etc) ourselves and without that we couldn't keep up with it now.
timbotheny26@reddit
75-100 tickets a week in a 1,600 person org seems surprisingly low to me.
bigmac______@reddit (OP)
i agree but that is on a slow week. i failed to say that the number i stated was a conservative one. the more pressing problem even if this is the constant number is the amount it takes to solve an issue because again nothings standardized.
timbotheny26@reddit
Gotcha.
BobcatALR@reddit
You guys are like the Spartans facing all those Persians…
flucayan@reddit
Coming from the MSP side of things I don’t think you’re understaffed at all.
The issue is everything else you posted. Over here we call that break fix operations and yes it leads to burnout, or worse eventually one guy becomes the hero on all systems and there’s a potential hostage situation.
bigmac______@reddit (OP)
interesting. care to elaborate why?
flucayan@reddit
You answered it already. BYOD, no standardization, unpredictability, and the security/legal risks. Your Helpdesk also shouldn’t really be doing password resets either. When I say break fix what I’m implying is the majority of your time is spent reacting to a fire rather than doing preventative work to mitigate issues arising, or creating methods in which end users can resolve non-technical problems themselves.
200 users per staff member isn’t that crazy. Try doing 200 users per staff spread across 5-15 different companies in different industries all using their own set of software. Like it’s very much doable but you have to take a look at reoccurring tickets and ask end users what their main pain points are in the process. Theres a threshold where after it occurs so many times within a quarterly or whenever you guys meet that you need to look into eliminating the root cause all together. Any down time is potential revenue and reputation lost for the company, and its worst at the customer facing level.
Hiring more people doesn’t reduce the tickets being created, and then there’s extra overhead, training hours, liability etc for the department. You need your manager to start talking time lost as it relates to dollars and cents to finance and executives.
g-rocklobster@reddit
You help desk with 2 full techs, 1 hybrid (I assume this one is really more full help desk right now) and the HD Lead is understaffed for the idiotic environment you're being forced into - BYOD - because that is always going to bring in far more issues than if you supplied the systems (either physical or virtual). But you already knew that else you wouldn't be here.
What, if anything, does management say? Are they concerned? You are specifically mentioning help desk - are the techs or the lead talking about it? If not, as much as I hate to use the term, this falls firmly into "not my problem" area. And, frankly, even if the help desk team was complaining, it doesn't sound like you're in their org line and unless someone in management ask for advice, I'm not sure how much you can do or what you can say to effect any change.
IF it gets to where HD is complaining and/or starts to have high turnover and IF management does nothing about it, I think that's a point where it's time YOU start looking to get out. Because that's a sure sign they are only caring about the profit coming in by refusing to make the changes they need to make: specifically ditch the BYOD environment.
bigmac______@reddit (OP)
You nailed it. this is exactly my thought process lol. you’re right its not my problem, but my role rn is leaning towards GRC/security and it irks me to be able to fill that role just to end up failing because of this “idiotic environment”. plus i have a really good buddy in the helpdesk team. i dont like the fact that we’ll lose him for incompetence of others.
i might leave soon but i am currently working on an org wide project that is too good to let go. ill prolly decide once i finish it this year.
SirachaSour@reddit
Me and my team of 3 support 1,500 people I wish we had 8
MangleIT@reddit
We have 1200 employees, but they vary on the amount of interface they have with the IT environment. It's retail. I have about 150 corporate staff that we manage. We have a Director (me), sysadmin, and 2 helpdesk. We have rough patches where things are super busy if something catastrophic has gone wrong, but for the most part my guys don't need to work overtime. We rely pretty heavily on automation where possible, and fixing systemic issues that create workload as they arise. I'm pretty proud of what we've built here, but having come from the MSP world, I know it's far from the norm.
BYOD is a huge problem here, unless you're doing VDI of some sort. That would be part of the "fixing systemic issues that create workload" bit... If you *have* to do BYOD, I'd recommend trying to make as many tools the employees use web-based, so that support is all back-end if possible. If their web browser on their device doesn't work, that is hardly your issue to solve...
Alas, I know how these things go... I would recommend spending a couple of days coming up with your version of an architecture that would work and justifying the hell out of it. Present your overhead with options to solve the issues. You'll either be a hero, or you'll know to polish up the old resume.
bigmac______@reddit (OP)
im very passionate with building architecture, which i just realized just last year so i can see me doing this.
i have recently considered moving on because i feel like the entire tech structure is just putting band aids on some holes and not sending a whole medical team for the bigger picture. so if this isn't considered at all even a little, i might have to finalize my decision.
i have one question tho since i didn't have any opportunity doing so in the past. If I want be fully equipped with all the answers, I might need to get some pricing. from what i've seen most enterprise plans or contracts require a meeting to agree on a number. since i will not be representing my company but instead just getting the data for a pitch, how would you suggest i do it? or do i get all my data from research first?
i got a lot from your input. appreciate it!!
MangleIT@reddit
Pricing in this industry is such a scam it's not even funny anymore. I'd suggest you go off published pricing and call it out that that's what it is, and that deals are probably available that could reduce spend. Unless you have the ability to reach out to a VAR to explain what you are trying to put together. They might put together some sweetheart deals for you to present, just in the interest of having an advocate on the inside if it comes to fruition.
Just make sure you're being very up front about how you came to the conclusions you did in the pitch. If you come up with a solution that improves a bunch of metrics, and make it clear that due diligence is not complete because you're not in a position to complete it, nobody is going to fault you for going with public figures where available, and leaving blanks where they aren't. Just make sure your pitch isn't "here's THE solution for". Pitch it more like... "here's an idea that we can look at to remove a lot of friction and possibly save future cost, let me know what you think. " and go from there.
Feel free to dm me if you want to go into any specifics. I'm notoriously bad at replying on here, but I'll try to pay attention/ turn on notifications.
bigmac______@reddit (OP)
ill dm you soon, if that isnt too much of a bother. appreciate it!
MangleIT@reddit
Not at all, happy to help!
daddyrabbit78@reddit
The byod is the bottleneck. Am I to assume most of your functional business operations live in the cloud? No way I’d have on-prem servers and data in a byod environment. Why your bosses don’t feel the need for standardized manageable devices is beyond me.
bigmac______@reddit (OP)
you’re right its mostly cloud but some clients do need them to have have apps installed so its not pure cloud. this is another bottleneck since our tool which is functioning as a container isnt friendly to every app or configuration. this is just one of the problems. instead of raising the issue to the vendor or client, the helpdesk team needs to get all the information and rule out its not our tool’s issue which could take a significant of time. if this happens to multiple uses with different tools, imagine the time strain. it sucks tbh
PrincipleExciting457@reddit
Yes. Normally this question is a maybe depending on the environment. But just… yes.
bigmac______@reddit (OP)
that was the protocol. BYOD devices should never be our responsibility. when we assist in helping it is mostly out of generosity or convenience but with our new tool, it shifted to us fixing the BYOD for the tool to work. just insane we’ve become slaves to this.
CraftedPacket@reddit
Depending on your user base and your applications that doesn't seem bad. We support about the same amount of users with a team of 5 technical staff. Standardization and automation.
Naclox@reddit
I think you missed the part where they're entirely BYOD. Standardization doesn't exist
bigmac______@reddit (OP)
Yeah, unfortunately, one day you know how to fix it, the next it's a completely zero-day issue. It gets crazy to catastrophic.
Naclox@reddit
So do you just throw your hands up at the very idea of IT security? I honestly don't know how you would manage BYOD in an org that size without a VDI platform.
bigmac______@reddit (OP)
im not sure if i can name the vendor here or i could potentially be doxxing myself by saying it, but basically it functions as a MAM, pseudo VDI. the gist is everything inside is within our controls but not as comprehensive as a remote desktop or a desktop itself. the idea is good, it serves its purpose well, the maintenance is just horrendous.
for the general security, we have different controls in place for cloud and access. the biggest gap we have in security is the BYOD, so much shadow IT i can't begin to count. but im not also saying, we're in a good spot. we are still lacking, if i was an insider i would be rich.
Frisnfruitig@reddit
Saying it's "a gap" in security is a huge understatement. It's a disaster waiting to happen and it will happen soon rather than later.
bigmac______@reddit (OP)
thats true. for someone who aspires to work in full time security someday, this makes my skin crawl.
Apprehensive-Cow-925@reddit
Bro seems like a common problem.
My company has around 400 active devices serving 450 clients as its an NPO some places need to share devices. Also have 300 Wisp clients in an old age home. 300 Cable TV client, 400+ cameras and expanding and also doing fibre rollout to 300 users where WISP is just not possible without a proper tower.
Luckily we have a standard setup and remote support system (not AD yet but planning for it) and no BYOD.
We are 3 Employees in the IT Dep 1: NOC, sysadmin , helpdesk ,network engineer, security etc. 1:Helpdesk, WISP tech and 1 guy as a cable tech slowly teaching him more and more.
Tickets average at around 280 a month. I totally agree that change needs to happen or you should start considering a jump somewhere else, always hard when you have built most of the stuff.
bigmac______@reddit (OP)
thank you. im very proud of where we’re at because of my contributions but we’ll still be nowhere until we get this ironed out once and for all.
a1155997@reddit
You got about 6 more bodies than my shithole MSP, that is somehow supposed to supports thousands and thousands of environments
mormied@reddit
2 poor guys on helpdesk supporting 1,600+ BYOD devices? Is that even humane?
JSFetzik@reddit
I have been in IT at a manufacturing company for 30 years. When we were that size we had 50-60 people in th It department. So yeah you are understaffed unless you out sourcing a lot of stuff.
q123459@reddit
ask to change byod to mac only
get a solution for self service 2 factor password reset
talk to your company legal to create policy that states you're not responsible for data loss of any non backed up personal data - ask if local law doesnt disallow you to do so.
provide cloud storage Or firm-sponsored external disk+backup app for those who cannot use cloud storage backup due to internet speed.
mandate that all losable user private app data must be synced into app account(s) and you're not responsible for login credentials, beside work credentials, advice to use password managers
mandate that vip users have to go to office for support if their data is not backed up.
provide option for users that cant afford to back up all their data and accounts responsibly to stop byod
mandate that your team is allowed to reimage byod systems
get patch management software on byod, make control groups of semi-similar hardware - do not update whole fleet of windows or drivers right when update is available, get rid of manufacturer update apps.
if users do conferencing and have dissamilar bluetooth headsets mandate that you can ask user to get to the office/or quote external bluetooth/ wifi+bluetooth adapter because some wifi chipsets is defective by design and some laptops cook their wifi card with heat
same for thunderbolt docks
for very specific app+devices find an msp expert in them, you dont need contract (single jobs costs more per job but still are affordable)
get this into vm
if you're not insured such bad tool is not a good idea
if you're not a manager then you can do nothing besides informing your manager that your work time resources are thin so you need more staff
Prudent_Cod_1494@reddit
If you’re big enough to have 1600 users you’re big enough to stop doing BYOD. Your IT manager should be working on making that happen. In an environment where you have standardized devices, 100 tickets with 2 full time help desk, two leads that do help desk (I assume escalations), and a hybrid help desk person (I assume backfill when normal help desk is overwhelmed, is completely manageable.
Honestly your manager should be doing this. If they’re not do it for them. It would probably cost a little over a million dollars to move everyone into company laptops (1600 unit buy gives you lots of leverage for discounts). All of that would be CAPEX and with accelerated depreciation it would lower the company’s tax liability by the total cost of the laptops in the current tax year. It would also dramatically increase your data security and all the projects you can’t get to now because everyone is scrambling with support needs will finally get worked on.
Start there, draft a proposal, give it to your manager, let them pass it off as their own, hopefully it works. If the manager doesn’t, talk about it in your next skip level and keep doing that until there’s a bite.
Kashek32@reddit
We’re a 800 staff / 4800 student / 12 site school district with 1 clerical support, 5 helpdesk, 1 sys admin, and me who does both network admin and supervisor. So 7. Curious if people think that is understaffed?
Fragrant-Eye-9421@reddit
Ha we have 2000 end points and usually only 2 help desk people. We have more techs in the company but they don't even slightly look at the service desk. We do have 3 service desk but one is usually doing onsite type of work. I closed 90 tickets this last week...
zockie@reddit
That’s pretty wild. We are about your size and have 4x the staff. Find a company that invests in their IT department and you’ll be better for it.
Crazy-Rest5026@reddit
We cover 1100 people with a team of 3. Talk about making my money
chrisgore-spor@reddit
Great question. I own a business that provides ongoing service and maintenance to meeting room technology which has a heavy reliance on BYOD.
We have taken a two staged approach to this.
Stage 1 - how to reduce the easy tickets. We deploy 2 things to solve this issue. Firstly, a workplace app. When someone walks into a room, their app shows them what room they are in and how to actually use the room. This avoids sally from accounts pulling cables and messing things up. Secondly, we have launched a learning centre. This is constantly updated with articles for common issues that are experienced. Clients and users simply jump onto the learning centre and start typing in the search bar which then sends them related articles. This is also massively helpful for IT help desk teams as it’s just a case of sending the user the article.
2 - for the more complex stuff. We now deploy a remote monitoring platform. All IP addresses are monitored across every meeting room across the globe. If an IP address is offline, our help desk get a notification and we proactively deal with the issue. Long before user tickets are raised.
Happy to send you a link to our learning centre if you want to see what I mean? Just let me know
TrainingOrchid516@reddit
I was by myself with 800 remote staff. It was a joke, but I got through it. I was replaced with 8 IT staff after I left. Now I run IT for a 300 person company. I hired a helpdesk role and I promoted 1 person to specialist to develop and take on bigger business problems. I spend most of my time developing or sysadmin type work. A lot depends on what your staff do, and turnover rates. Our GIS devs require little help, but more system setup, plus their own servers. Our field data collectors need replacement devices, some app maintenance. Theyre easy to help. Our offices are super simple with Unifi everything. Microsoft everything. Low maintenance, easy to fix or expand. We could go down to 1 person and be fine, but id never say that to mgmt. No one is stressed. We all share what's going on. Mgmt is happy with us because we solve problems.
BisonThunderclap@reddit
An important metric you left out is average time to close a ticket.
The number of tickets is pretty worthless without this measure.
bigmac______@reddit (OP)
i dont have the data without having to pull up my tools but from the top of my head, the complex ones can range to days, in the extremes it lasts a week. it can go over if we have to contact the vendor. i had a ticket before when i wasn't part of the systems team yet where a zoom crashing because of the tool took a month for the vendor to fix.
tangentx@reddit
To dog pile onto this, if you aren’t approaching the problem with data, you won’t be able to present a reasonable argument to upper management.
To start, address your overall workload: Tickets per month * Average time per ticket.
Average time per ticket should be based on closed tickets over a period of time, say 3 months. Exclude tickets that fall outside the norm, 0 minute tickets(we get these from child tickets) or extremely high times. Once you have those you can calculate how many engineering hours are needed and can extrapolate future need.
You also need to calculate tickets per user/endpoint (whatever your unit metric is). This allows you to predict ticket growth based on changes such as onboarding/offboarding.
Additionally, you need to calculate how many hours a full time engineer can produce per month. This can be calculated many ways, but the simplest approach is the following: Total Hours * % of utilization (this needs to factor for PTO, admin/ meeting time etc.)
Once you have that, you can simply divide your engineering hours by FTE hours to get the number of needed FTEs.
There is a lot more to this when it comes to forecasting need and overlaying this with revenue, but this should help to get you started.
The comparison to revenue becomes important because at the end of the day, regardless of resource need, you still need to be able to maintain profitability. If you can’t, then you have to consider the efficiency of resources: time padding, slow workers, opportunities for automation, etc.
Also, don’t be afraid to replace under performers. This matters a lot more than people realize and is a key way to improve team efficiency.
BisonThunderclap@reddit
You need to know average time per ticket. That's the only way you can project workload.
I've had 8 hour days years apart where I closed 5 tickets daily or 25 on Helpdesk.
It's so important you know this. Everyone saying you're understaffed has never had to manage a labor budget.
SiIverwolf@reddit
1,600 users and BYOD devices?
Yeah no wonder you have issues.
I have supported environments that allowed the use of BYOD before, but we also had a very strict "no support of BYOD issues" policy.
We only supported business systems / endpoints.
cyberman0@reddit
I think it's possible doing a 100 to 1 ratio but the actual problems lies in the BYOD that is insane these days unless everything is managed via Web GUI for stuff like stores. However they need to fix that, they are just asking for vulnerability hit.
slash_f15@reddit
Coming from MSP land, this size seems ok, but, your team should be more of a pyramid shape, not the rectangle it is now. Having 2 team leads is over the top for the team size. One of the team leads needs to be across both Projects and Helpdesk together, and your other team lead needs to be reassigned as a Tier 2 or 3 on Helpdesk. For Projects, the IT Manager and single team lead should be more than capable of making the larger decisions for the systems.
Muted-Part3399@reddit
bad it practices AND 1600 users????
EmmaRoidz@reddit
My last place of work had 1600 employees.
We had 5 windows sys admins, 4 Linux sys admins, 4 network engineers, 4 desktop/apps, 8 help desk, 4 cyber, 4 ot engineers/cyber. Plus around 15-30 contractors for various upgrade projects which varied. Plus management.
planehazza@reddit
550 staff. 1 network manager, a senior tech (does most dev stuff), three (soon to be two) techs. No help desk as such and users that refuse to log tickets despite it being a simple case of email ictsupport@domain.com
We're understaffed so you definitely are.
KaMaFour@reddit
Depends. If you are maintaining paper pushers with clearly defined processes and no upgrade plan it will probably do. In normal companies that's pushing it
ImportantMud9749@reddit
BYOD is what is killing you. You need to either supply standard laptops and stop supporting BYOD or set up a virtual environment for them to log in to with their own device.
That way help desk can focus on fixing the VDI app on users devices or point them to the web portal temporarily. You, the other systems, and the hybrid guy handle the virtual environment and make sure each user group gets what they need access to.
No more complex software on a wide array of end user devices to troubleshoot. Just fix the VDI app or point them to HTML. Over time, the help desk should mostly be helping users with getting into VDI, basic VDI use, and general account/access.
If those are not an option, you should at least set bare minimum BYOD standards for support so you don't have a help desk employee troubleshooting a 15 year old system for a week.
After that, you can see if you have a staffing issue. But the main issue I'm seeing is that they are being used (maybe only indirectly) as personal tech support.
bigmac______@reddit (OP)
I definitely agree, BYOD is killing us. It was manageable back then but when this new tool was implemented to improve our security, it did so with the cost of productivity and our mental health. not to mention, implementing this was a pain. Most of our tickets come from this tool, it's crazy. But of course we can't pull the plug since we have a contract and an executive proposed this, so we have to stand by it.
I would say I have a good macro perspective on most things and providing company devices or at least a VDI is the only option here. but this tool when it was brought to us, I had no say in. Our CEO does not support providing devices so VDI is definitely not just an option but a requirement since our end users handle loads of PHI. Our cybersec insurance would go bankrupt from us when it happens (knock on wood).
it sucks, one day we are the IT of the company, now it has subtly shifted to the IT of our employees. when in fact, we should be making improvements org-wide, not helping users.
JaffaCakeStockpile@reddit
u\ImportantMud9749 is 100% right. Everyone focusing on the size of your team question is missing the way bigger issues.
Frankly your IT manager sounds completely out of their depth and needs a CTO / IT director to lead change.
Kill byod. Standardise on a virtualized environment such as AVD, implement entra I'd SSO for everything and watch the ticket pile collapse...
OneSeaworthiness7768@reddit
Wait so you use BYOD computers, no VDI currently, and your users handle PHI?? Big yikes
goingslowfast@reddit
What exactly does this tool do!
matt0_0@reddit
How exactly are you guys securing PHI on byod computers?! Like your staffing issues are a problem but maybe not the biggest problem? Or even top 3?
goingslowfast@reddit
With VDI there shouldn’t be any PHI on end user devices.
bigmac______@reddit (OP)
we're gradually getting there for data security, this is mostly what im working on - governance and security. but we're growing at an unprecedented rate, IT can't keep up and the helpdesk team got the brunt of it.
matt0_0@reddit
Are you getting there? With BYOD? How are you encrypting the hard drives of the computers you don't own? I'm genuinely excited to learn how your team is accomplishing this because I've always said it's impossible
Ssakaa@reddit
The way I'd do it, they don't have the staff for... and probably not the budget. Nobody has data. They have a remote session that has data...
Bulky-Stick2704@reddit
BYOD should not be supported outside of company apps in mandated security container on device. That's the only part you should support. The container.
Faaak@reddit
Hey Bob, this tool is not working out. Should we cut our losses?
GremlinNZ@reddit
Agreed, BOYD is going to hand your arse to you as you can't control the device.
~2k users and we have 4 staff from IT Manager to helpdesk for day to day and migrations etc. Probably light, but we have support partners to handle telephony, servers etc.
fearless-fossa@reddit
BYOD is obviously your largest issue, but have you thought about taking some of the load from the helpdesk by having a self-service platform for passwords and the like? This should be the first hurdle users have to come in contact with instead of actual humans.
Fuzzy_Paul@reddit
We handled 2500 with 3 people. No big deal. The problem is not the number of tickets. It is the self supporting that fails. You need to setup a faq and a help wizard so people go to that before submitting a ticket. Most knowledge base can be hooked up before tickets are allowed to be submitted. Go through the history of tickers and get a top 20 and fix those in the knowledgebase or in the software if that is the cause. 100 tickets a day to to many so there is structurally something wrong. Focus on that and the number will drop significant. Discharge the head it cause this is his job to bring up and lowerthre workload on you guys. Yes i am head it and we have done all that and we are cruising.
Timberwolf_88@reddit
Once upon a time in my career I was in a team of 2 serving roughly 1000 employees, and I was not even support staff, rather IT Manager.
We were extremely understaffed, this scenario that OP has makes them still understaffed, but I'd say that as long as the team knows what they're doing 2-3 more should absolutely be sufficient.
OneSeaworthiness7768@reddit
75-100 tickets per week is not too bad on volume, but it depends on how many they’re closing a day or getting stuck on. When I worked in help desk it wasn’t uncommon for me to handle 100 tickets a week just myself. But I was closing anywhere from 85-95% of tickets on first contact usually. So there’s a lot of variables that make it context dependent.
My current company is ~2300ish users. ~120 people in our IT department as a whole, across many teams and disciplines. The service desk and desktop support teams are probably in the neighborhood of 20 people.
St0nywall@reddit
It really only matters how many of the employees utilize your services per week.
If you're managing with what you have right now, then I would say you're fine.
If you have metrics showing you need another body in a certain area, then that goes through the manager to get approval to hire.
I can honestly say your team is 2 people more than the last team I was on and they dealt with the same amount of users. The team was later increased to add 3 more people after I left. So it seems capability may play a part in how well you deal with the workflow.
Techatronix@reddit
Do you guys significantly outsource? I could see this setup if you are working with an MSP. If not, then good luck.
Snoo_76315@reddit
I would say 1 more help desk person should be added to avoid over flow to systems/projects. If you haven competent techs than no…you are appropriately staffed. My team is 1 manager, 2 tier 3’s, 1 tier 2 and 2 tier 1’s. We handle close to 200+ tickets every week with over 4000 end users.
Our beginning and ending ticket count for open tickets stays around 30 in total. It has been as low as 15 before.
pepper_man@reddit
Wtf bro, phone must be ringing off the hook. You will be dragged into more and more support and systems will suffer
childishDemocrat@reddit
I had a team of 2 support engineers, over 1000 email accounts under Management with a random assortment of desktops, operating systems, phones, management levels and user experience levels at around 100 small businesses, manufacturers and government/educational institutions. A few dozen servers. We did server installs. Network design. Data center installs. Full desktop replacements. Server room moves. Cloud migration. You name it. Y'all are wimps ;) did that for like 25 years. As well as run a website and software development, and hosting company (2 person staff there too). PS - I was one of the two on the support team.
threshforever@reddit
We have ~100 users managed by 2.5 techs and 2 sys admins and I feel like we are understaffed. Yall needed to start hiring about 1000 users ago lmfao
Panic2211@reddit
We have 5 people for 200 lol
Known-Air8533@reddit
This is an old schema called: All chiefs no indians 🙄
amang_admin@reddit
Mind your business. You're not the IT manager.
JynxedByKnives@reddit
Your team is too small. But how are your ticket numbers so low for your team? Is that 75-100 tickets per tech per week?
At my job its a law firm. 300 end users. And im averaging 75+ tickets a week myself not including the 3 other techs and helpdesk manager. My volume seems to be way higher with significantly less end users.
My team is. 1 director 1 hd manager 3 hd techs L1-2 (including me) 1 hd tech L3 1 sys admin
We vendor out alot of work and dont keep much in house.
Solid_Math1336@reddit
I seem to be a bit underreprested in terms of opinion no I sont think you are understaffed I have and it team of a smaller size handling 3x the ticket workload It seems to be and Automation/standardization issue from helpdesk to (2. line issue) could be more complex but I don't have further info to judge this
katarh@reddit
1 tech person per 100 end users is what I vaguely recall reading as the ideal amount. For a company of \~1600 employees, that means a total IT staff of around 15-16 people.
So yeah, you're running on half the bodies you need to be.
Joshuapocalypse@reddit
Just imagine, same client load, same byod, plus low voltage, and 75% OPs staff. So, four admins and two are double tasked. 🫠
RandomPony@reddit
We had 5 helpdesk 5 desktop for 3,000 users.....
slayermcb@reddit
I heard the ideal ratio should be 1 IT person, plus an additional person for every 100 users. This would put your organization at 17 people. Note I said Ideal. Im 3 guys short myself on this ratio. At 300 users...
FireCyber88@reddit
We’re 150 users. 3 people in IT. So 1:50.
1600/50 =32 IT members needed
countsachot@reddit
That seems kind of small, at least in the help desk dept, and you probably need another implementation systems engineer, or whatever title you want to give them.
prspyder@reddit
def 2 small where I have worked the avg is 9 tickets worked a day busier days is like 11-12 but again average is 9 so you need more guys obviously
Trust_8067@reddit
The size of your environment, in terms of servers, capacity, performance requirements is far more important than just a head count.
If your company is 80% sales people who just need 2 VMs running a small SQL database that can live on local disk, then you're way over staffed.
If you have 15,000 guests in a 10PB environment and 2 dozen Oracle databases running off a scaled up VMAX 950F, then you need a few more people.
Thyg0d@reddit
Without knowing type of users you have, I was running all Azure & M365, networks and stuff for 1500 users, alone, over 5 countries, 13 sites and a factory until recently when I got two it colleagues in the factory, one support (global) and one factory IT, thank god.. But I'm probably in a different environment than you because we might see 4-6 tickets in a day, not counting new hires that need stuff.
My setup is fully automated. HR system that controls account creation and deletion. Dynamic groups, DL's, apps getting pushed via intune, defender and sentinel working together on common threats/signals/alerts.. No password resets, sspr is used for that.
1-2 hrs of trying to sort a ticket at most then machine wipe. All backed on oneDrive so users don't loose data.
Stonewalled9999@reddit
1000 people in a factory isn’t that hard to support a few kiosk PCs. It’s the 500 laptop users that have 4 screens and three docks and oh a spare desktop PC for them that is the hard part.
Ssakaa@reddit
The real sign of how understaffed you are with those numbers, isn't ratios or any of that. It's... you cannot have two people in even adjacent roles, let alone the same role, take a day off. Seriously. One of you legitimately gets sick for a couple days, the other has to cancel their vacation or everything falls apart. That... isn't sustainable.
If one of you catches a bus with your face, or even just says screw it and leaves, taking all your institutional knowledge with you? The wheels fall off.
MENoir@reddit
You'd be surprised how long shit can run like that.
blackjaxbrew@reddit
Not terrible but BYOD is the big killer, we handle 500 users per tech, but streamlined everything top to bottom. Laptop deployment happens in an hours worth of work for instance. Servers can be up and running in minutes.
humptydumpty369@reddit
Lucky! I've got 150 end users, and average the same for tickets. Granted most of it is just user training and unfortunately you can't fix stupid.
Amazing-Tree-7038@reddit
It depends if you want a functional business.
_gneat@reddit
You should be worried about the owners’ profits or the shareholders’ profits. Cutting staff, offshoring or bringing in H1B visa workers is where it’s at. Zero sarcasm
Jamdrizzley@reddit
Helpdesk 1 is fucking diabolical loooool
flatulating_ninja@reddit
I just left a company with no helpdesk and over 1000 employees. IT director lied his ass off in the interviews when I asked about what the day to day would look like. All I did was tickets, on/offboarding and other tier 1 shit all day long.
Ssakaa@reddit
I mean, they did have a helpdesk... just a helpdesk with an overinflated title and, hopefully, at least the paycheck to match... but, now? Now they have no helpdesk...
flatulating_ninja@reddit
Way overpaid for what I was doing, slightly underpaid for what I was expecting to do. They replaced me with someone more junior after I left.
brumsk33@reddit
Are you public or private? Too small either way, but it sounds like a public entity.
KStieers@reddit
This IT per user number is so
Test-NetConnection@reddit
Yes, you are very very understaffed. Standard ratio is somewhere between 45-100 users per help desk staff with the range being based on environment type and job duties. Highly regulated industries like healthcare and finance will require more staff for each employee.
Ok-Analysis5882@reddit
The place where I am , we dont have a dedicated IT, its blended into Dev Sec Ops, It took10 years to get there, plus we have a ton of Citizen IT who act as force multiplier. Not hiring anyone external since corona. we poach people from other departments.
st1ngrayy@reddit
There’s a better way to look at this.
If IT were a school, and each of you are teachers, how many students per teacher do you have?
Does that number sound remotely fair?
djgizmo@reddit
yes. need way more help desk / desktop support.
hkusp45css@reddit
I have an IT team of 9 for ~130 users. CIO, IT Manager, Security, sysanalyst, dev/db, infra admin, 3 desktop/jr admins.
jeffrey_f@reddit
One more can make a difference. Management should be aware that too few leads to burn out, burnout leads to turnover. Turnover leads to even more tickets because the new guy will not be up to speed for a while, burning out others faster. And the nasty cycle repeats.
Nnyan@reddit
BYOD with no standardized hardware is a nightmare.
KaijinSurohm@reddit
From being in multiple IT jobs over my career, a comfortable rule of thumb is to avoid having your helpdesk get stuck with more then 10-15 tickers per helpdesk IT at any time.
Once you start pushing 20-25 ticks on average, it time to start looking at why, and you may need to hire more people.
Your numbers indicate your 2 helpdesk is sitting at 50 at any given time. That's straight up overkill and can cause people to be waiting to get help for literal days before they even get a complimentary "We have your ticket" type of notification.
Also, how does a BYOD setup actually work when you're dealing with over 1,600 people? That tells me that you don't actually have a solid internalized setup, or you're actually trying to incorporate personal devices into a network, which is an overall security nightmare in itself.
That's a nightmare for firewall security, lack of software use monitoring, an inffeciant way to quickly troubleshoot programs, and an inability to properly determine if any new incoming software will be compatible with existing hardware to due everyone having their own setup.
Scrap the BYOD, get your team a uniformed hardware setup, and look into 5-6 Helpdesk dedicated people.
You're way understaffed, and not even remotely ready for any managed network help.
"BYOD" and "Managed Network" do NOT mesh.
******
I'm going to be honest. It's going to suck, and it's going to cost an arm and a leg, but what I would recommend:
Look up a computer line, (whether Dell or Apple) and set up a vendor contract so you can just focus on that one brand, then get an OS setup imaged with programs that are required for your customers.
If your 1600 customers are all in the same company, that makes this easier, otherwise if said 1600 are from different sub groups, then you'll need to make an image plan for each.
From there, you will need to charge your customer a deployment fee for each operation they are running. We're talking like $100 a month, per person you provide a computer to. This will help recuperate the immediate loss of buying everyone new hardware, while also help build back up the overhead it costs your team to actually help troubleshoot.
From there, implement a ZERO TOLERANCE "BYOD" policy. If you don't have one of your computers, they don't get on your network.
This will dramatically help bring your company back in line with what you actually need, and makes troubleshooting significantly easier.
It'll reduce call time, troubleshooting time, and you can adopt a policy of "If your program was not pre-approved to work on our computers, you don't get to use it".
This will absolutely destroy your yearly budget, but if you can get past this growing pain, it'll iron out your issues and give you a return on investment large enough that that you can afford more Helpdesk people.
bigmac______@reddit (OP)
yo this is very sound advice. the transition would be extremely painful but i am with you that once we get past that, i feel like we'll all be reincarnated lol.
pitching this is one thing, but i dont think our CEO would sign off on this. the tool in question is also, backed by an executive and optics are very important for them so i would basically challenging his/her tool and potentially his/her loss of credibility. not to mention my job. he/she is a very nice person, so i have to weigh this too so it wouldn't be easy - alternatively, i could pitch this however when our contract is almost up.
we are also 100% remote, so managing these devices and placing images would mean a change in work setup for the IT, but I think we can do it plus all our users are in one country.
but your insight is very much appreciated!! i hope ur sheets are always cold and cozy
volster@reddit
To my mind likely the only way around out of that sort of nightmare is by cataclysmicly bombing an audit.... Preferably the sort that discovers people have been running a tor exit node that somehow exposes the entire LAN and a treasure trove of pirated Adobe and unlicensed jre being used for company benefit
... You don't aim to undermine the tool itself - you go for the utter liability shit show with no way to compel compliance or even to force a terminated employee to allow you to remove company ip from their personal device
"Nah I think I'm good, I'll just keep it turned off and see what the Chinese will give me for a trade in"
Until something bites them in the ass, whether it be a breach, having their insurance cancelled etc then any naysaying is just going to be seen as an unnecessary expense at best and insubordination to their chosen way of dealing with it at worst
All you can really do is usher that day along by pushing for more compliance schemes (preferably framed to be fed back to you as their idea)
BoltActionRifleman@reddit
In my opinion, assuming you can get management onboard, would be to immediately start supplying employees with company owned, managed devices. I can’t even fathom how horrible it must be trying to manage a user base that large with a shit-show of home PCs.
I know things can be containerized etc., but even so, the security implications of a system like this would keep me up at night.
BigLeSigh@reddit
We have 3000 staff, 2000 physical devices.
We have an infrastructure team of about 50 We have a security team of about 70 Helpdesk/second line about 10
And we are understaffed - although I’m sure if we replaced some of the clowns with semi-capable people we’d be fine!
BoysenberryDue3637@reddit
Just retired CTO here. Here is our breakdown.
6000 total people/3000 tech workers.
System side:
1 Director of Operations.
3 Network Engineer
2 Infrastructure Engineer
1 Desktop/Intune Engineer
3 Dev/Ops Engineer
3 Database
Help Desk Side:
1 Director help desk
6 Client support
Field support:
1 Director
1 Phone systems
7 Field support
WolfetoneRebel@reddit
Jesus Christ
allianceHT@reddit
Dude, on my sector there are 4 Managers, 2 Team Leads, 2 Architects and 7 developers... Is crazy
Inproba@reddit
I would say your team needs 3-4 more people.
I worked in an IT team of 4 people (excl. the IT Manager) and we managed 600 users. And that went fine.
RevolutionaryWorry87@reddit
1300 users. Head of IT, infrastructure manager, team of 7. Service desk manager, team of 7.
We are definitely too many people I think but hey ho.
bigmac______@reddit (OP)
are u hiring? kidding, i think you're in a good place if you think you're too many people.
RevolutionaryWorry87@reddit
I mean sure, but i find myself 'looking' for work alot. Its frustrating as we've just +2'd, i'd rather have less, do more work, and feel more secure. I know it's a tough problem to have.
bigmac______@reddit (OP)
we're clearly off topic but i can see that. i haven't stated it in my post, but im doing a lot with org wide projects often times a lil bit too much and that translates to having a pretty solid seat where i am. i dont wanna say more about me since it might sound conceited but i definitely feel you.
i would suggest to do some self-study since you have that capacity. i do sometimes squeeze some self-learning when i get invested in something. best of both worlds for us ig. good luck out there!
RevolutionaryWorry87@reddit
Yeah I'm doing alot of it to be fair. But sorry back on topic, yes your definitely far understaffed not even accounting for annual leave etc.
cyberladyDFW@reddit
The team seems small. What would happen if one of your IT Leads went on a 2 week vacation or won a billion dollar lottery? Would you be able to keep up with the workload?
Forgotmyaccount1979@reddit
Understaffed by half.
If you double your IT footprint, and actually force people to make tickets for everything, I bet you'll see the number closed per week increase a lot.
Flat-Description-484@reddit
Seconding some comments here. Your team is way too small, bud. Also, seems like your BYOD is the main issue. You could probably draw a hard line on personal devices.
Doublestack00@reddit
Depends greatly on the environment.
We had 6,500 employees and only had 4 full time (including the CIO) and 1 part time. The users were spread across two countries.
bigmac______@reddit (OP)
if it's BYOD and heavy on data then i am in awe.
Doublestack00@reddit
All Google environment. Hated it at first, but grew to absolutely love it.
All cloud, zero infrastructure, allows the company to be super fluid.
Seaturtle5@reddit
6 years ago. 2000 users, 3 IT staff.
1x Manager (mainly a sysadmin) 1x Sysadmin (me) 1x Helpdesk
No BYOD, lots of shared stations (municipal, health care, management and more)
We 80 Virtual machines, 3 data rooms with duplication, redundancy, HA, our own black fiber setup with 100Gbit links.
How we solved it:
Me and the manager automated the shit out of most things, I built a tool for our helpdesk person to quickly solve the most common issues that couldnt be automated.
Using helpdesk statistics I trained the system owners(super users) at each location once a month on technical challenages and most common issues.. i had to convince my manager to allow a few days to do this. But long term it helped greately.
Our infrasteucture was pretty solid. Almost no technical debt, we planned everything between us(often drunk) on how to do stuff, documented every line of command we ran. (Almost never used gui, as server core was our go to.)
Monitoring was a big thing, nothing got implemented unless we could monitor its health, updates etc.
The government were really supportive and we had a seat at the table where we could directly influence decisions for software and rollout. Updates happened weekly, often during work hours, it was pretty much understood that if IT did an update you grab a coffee. Only place we did it during night hours was health sector.
I do miss that job still, best I ever had, loved coming into work every day, just being able to play around like a big homelab, just that it was production and we has strict guidelines, but we were flexible.
I changed to a boring job working 2/4 rotation for 4x the pay... still hang out and get drunk with multiple people from that job.
(Ask away if you dont believe me, but offloading to super users and a solid foundation not allowing tech debt works wonders.
New job not so great, but management wont allow for downtime and pushes deadlines on us)
Seaturtle5@reddit
Btw, byod can work pretty well, depends on what software theyre running and if remote desktop can help.
Also, looking at password ticket in your post, self service! 7 people for 1600 is very doable, work on automation and solve the core of your problems
Fair_Helicopter_8531@reddit
** Warning: This is just my personal opinion based off what I have experienced and I have no idea the sector you are in, your environment, your departments budget or culture so all suggestions I made are just very generic and based off my experience. **
Short Answer: Yeah this sounds way too little for your current environment and will most certainly cause burnout for your helpdesk long-term. A good ratio differs from company to company based off what you manage (legacy\issue prone apps require more support so more help desk techs), extremely high uptime means more techs if your company views any downtime of users as unacceptable (right now if less than .25% of users have an issue at the same time or around the same (techs are held up due to long troubleshooting) then there is user downtime)
Long Answer:
Yeah this sounds way to small for a number of reasons, but it seems the main one is the environment itself. Normally when you see people on here mention extremely large tech:user ratios it is mainly because 3 main factors (most of the time working together).
* Extremely easy to manage applications - (internet browsers, office applications, a handful of industry\business specific applications, and then utility ones (AV\EDR, VPN, Endpoint Management\RMM, and remote viewers). Sometimes it is even easier if iti is a mostly virtualized environment where it is easier to standardize things even further making it easier to diagnose, troubleshoot, and resolve issues rapidly.
* Great Documentation\Vendor Support Contracts - As in if a inexperienced tech encounters an issue they have a clear steps to guide them through the problem and if the issue is not documented or normal fixes don't work then a great support channel for a vendor can also be a huge help. You want to make sure that the documentation side as this will help you onboard any new techs more easily without constant hand holding.
* Automation - The ability to preemptively remediate issues before they occur can be a game-changer after a while. You can look and see what you are using for endpoint management and using to deploy apps as a decent number of tools allow you to setup ways to monitor the machine and to take automated actions after X failures or X seconds. It will help one narrow down the troubleshooting process knowing Y cause should not be an issue anymore and reduces the flow of tickets coming in.
That being said from where you mentioned the manager and your superiors already being stretched thin and helpdesk not wanting to push any solution, so your options are kind of limited most likely. If I was in your shoes here is what I would do in a order of do now or asap vs trying to accomplish in the longer terms. Again, I don't know the actual product or the troubleshooting steps you guys take so this may be useless but thought I would still type it out.
Immediately:
Look at the last 4 weeks of tickets and find the top 5 common issues (or grouping if closely adjacent) and try and create some level of documentation for them (doesn't help to hire new people if they are dead weight and helpdesk is already too slammed to train them properly so having documentation can help that onboarding for you). It doesn't have to be precise (do X, Y, Z for a fix) but can be just here are some common causes (and tips or ideas (or the process of if able) on how to solve them). What are some good things to check (logs, event viewer events, central management server)? Create a easy to follow template so it can be standardized if helpdesk starts making new articles later.
Short term:
Preferably higher more support staff but I understand you don't make those decisions and bosses don't seem that down), so instead I would focus on trying to automate any pre-emptive fixes (if the issues occur due to services crashing, corrupted files, or something random you can try and auto-remediate).
Long Term:
Once you get approval from managers then you can try and look at more stable alternatives to use to make it easier for everyone.
6Saint6Cyber6@reddit
That’s definitely light. You’re going to need numbers tho. How long does it take someone to get help? Are people able to take vacation? What happens if 2 helpdesk people get sick at the same time? Whats the turnover like ( if you are losing someone every 6 months, the onboarding process gets really expensive) ? Is IT meeting their SLAs?
sdizzyd@reddit
~1500 users, ~1k endpoints, 80 offices remote Team of 3 - network/security sysadmin (part-time), sysadmin/help desk, help desk.
bigmac______@reddit (OP)
damn either your team is really good and efficient or your tools have very low maintenance.
sdizzyd@reddit
We are struggling. It wasn't by design though. We push off as much as we can to vendors (hate to be that person) but otherwise we'd be drowning.
twenty-two22@reddit
A bit understaffed IMO, I worked at an MSP with 900+ small-medium businesses, and after some internal company politics, we went from a team of 7 down to just 2. I burned out really really quick. We wwere already struggling with a full team, and then it turned into constant tickets.
Majority of the day was spent on intake and mitigation of upset people, it would awhile before we could get anything done unless it was for something major. Toward the end, it was just a glorified call center, and any real troubleshooting had to be done after hours or just squeezed in whenever we had the time.
Definitely try to have a talk about including maybe another person for helpdesk, or maybe another hybrid to assist with everyone's workload.
notta_3d@reddit
There is this little thing called Security. Who's doing that?
SusAdmin42@reddit
Let me ask you this: if someone is out sick, do you feel understaffed? Is it possible for 2 members of your team to have overlapping vacations (summer is short in most of the US)? If the answer is yes to either, then the answer to your question is yes.
bigmac______@reddit (OP)
This is my fastest YES.
Envelope_Torture@reddit
Your team is way too small and 1 manager + 2 leads for a team of 8 people inclusive is also kind of silly.
firehydrant_man@reddit
many such cases of more managers than workers at garbage run companies
iamliterate@reddit
We’ve got 6 for 200 staff. Your team seems way too small for a BYOD environment. But also BYOD seems wild to me tbh.
StatementNext682@reddit
Beats my set up
IT Manager: 1
Helpdesk(when the manager is busy): 2
Supporting 200 employees
3tek@reddit
175 users and just me lol
2donks2moos@reddit
Your staff is a K-12 Tech Director's dream. I have 200 staff. I have 1,600 students. All 1,800 have a Chromebook and about 100 also have a PC. I am the entire IT department. I do everything from Chromebook repairs to servers to networking.
timothy53@reddit
Automate simple password resets
twenty-two22@reddit
Understaffed, I worked at an MSP with 900+ small businesses and after some internal company politics, we went from a team of 7 to a team of 2. Burnt out so quick, it was at a point that we were struggling with the full team and then it was just constant tickets one after the other. By the time it came down to me and someone else it was just a headache after another. Most of the day spent with intake then when took awhile until we could get anything done unless it was major. Basically a call center towards the end and troubleshooting was done off hours or during time we had to squeeze in.
Little to no downtime.
I would really advise just trying to get another set of hands for helpdesk or even another hybrid because how taxing that might be for everyone.
corruptboomerang@reddit
I have 100 staff & 600 students (over 1000 active devices on the network).
We have 2 IT team, 1 Head of IT (he doesn't really do much, he 'manages'), and me (Helpdesk / SysAdmin / Networking / Cybersecurity)... 😂 🤣
Any-Fly5966@reddit
Short answer - Yes.
Long answer - YAAAAAASSSSS
unknwnerrr@reddit
Understaff? Maybe. Company being broke/cheap. Yes. BYOD 😂😂
bigmac______@reddit (OP)
uhhh i think we know the answer... LMAO
Brand0_the_Mand0@reddit
I have 3 of us for 1000 users. 2 SA, 1 IA
HeKis4@reddit
My dude I was at a company where we had this team for half that size. Plus a couple "mission software" support specialists.
AndreiWarg@reddit
Fuck that. Absolutely not, the first opportunity I'd get I'd be gone.
420bernie2020@reddit
No security engineers, BYOD, you must have all sorts of vulns in your environment
bigmac______@reddit (OP)
I can't stress this enough. I am more of the go-to security person and my IT manager, but neither of us has gone through rigorous experience and training. ig we are the more capable ones about GRC and security. we are extremely lacking, i am not ecstatic for the future. i might jump ship but don't tell
Stephen_Dann@reddit
Look at time per ticket. But also rank them, so both the quick level one and long level 3 don't give a false impression. Depends on the industry and typical skill level of staff, I would expect 2 - 3 L1, 4 L2, 2 L3 including escalation. Then, again depends on the size of the infrastructure, 3 - 5 system engineers. One or maybe both of the L3 could also cover systems.
RoeikiB@reddit
I work at a hospital Our helpdesk team is 3-4 members We got around 100-120 calls a day
CollegeFootballGood@reddit
Yes lmaooo
amcco1@reddit
That is basically identical to the ratio we have at where I work.
SofterBones@reddit
Jesus christ, yes you're way understaffed
xSchizogenie@reddit
Understaffed.