Number of site techs per site?

I’d like to know if there is any data, even rules of thumb, for how many people can be supported by one IT site tech.

(My husband supports 128, on 14 applications. He and I would like to know how this compares to the average. He does it well, by the way, but they keep cutting back on techs.)

I googled, but didn’t find anything at all that helped. Most of it was about call in help desks.

Thanks. Any leads are welcome.

I work in It although software development. I do get to see a lot of other IT jobs at work though. Your husband’s load seems like an incredibly high number if you is doing the whole thing himself. I think the typical load would be half or less. The number of applications seems really high too unless all he is doing is installing them.

Our company supports anywhere from 200-500 users per onsite tech (purely desktop support), but there are several factors which play into it. First of all, we promote as many self-help tools as possible on an Intranet site. Only when they submit a ticket through that site or place a call into our call-center does the issue then go either to the tier-1 helpdesk in our call-center, or forwarded to our offshore Backoffice team in Mexico. If not resolved at that point, a desktop issue could be serviced first by a Remote Resolution team, our group of virtual techs who use remote control software like Netmeeting to help fix an issue. Lastly, a desktop technician who is actually onsite will help reimage a PC if nothing else has worked so far. If you’re nice, that tech might even help save your data. :slight_smile:

Anyway, this massive structure does have to service 30,000+ clients in the US and Canada on a shoestring budget, so there is justification for all the tiers of service. But if it means only having 5 techs for a 2500 user site as opposed to 25, there’s a huge cost savings to be had.

How has it gone over? The users hate it. But their IT costs are paid centrally, and billed back to the business per seat. If they really care, their business unit can pay for additional techs to be onsite, but more often than not, they opt out of it.

Of course, the support just changed hands to a different company, so we can expect a whole different structure soon. And don’t get me started on Backoffice/Server support. Application support is yet another matter altogether.