Looking for anyone to provide best practice solutions for ratio of IT staff to church and day school staff/machines. We have a church and school staff of just over 300. Our day school runs just over 700 students. We have 3 campuses that total just over 420,000 sq.ft. Over 300 computers, 15 servers. This does not count the student devices. All campuses are covered with WIFI as well as hard wire connectivity. Our phones are VOIP.
Currently we only have 1 full time IT person. We know we need more. Any ideas of how many we should have?
There is no standard answer as it depends heavily on infrastructure and automation investment which can have dramatic effects on support load (and it can be very dramatic, I’ve seen anywhere from a 1 to 30 to a 1 to 750 ratio), but I will say that I like to separate the church IT function from the school IT function when you have situations like this. The two have different objectives and different needs and schools should be budgeting/charging accordingly so that they have their own IT needs covered (wouldn’t be surprised if you needed 2 for it at 700 students). From there, on the church side, it comes down to whether or not it’s a reasonable load for one guy, two guys, or a combination thereof with an MSP to back him/them up.
We’ve recently went from a 1 man shop to 1.5 for (225 devices/150 users) and I have seen ratios hold true to 1:225 endpoints if we are talking about maintaining and keeping the ship running.
But you will potentially sacrifice your time during the week that should be spent (future proofing/planning/implementing those big changes that need to happen but you just can’t find the time for). So I would say the ratio to be able to keep things going AND have time to make strategic decisions instead of reactionary would be closer to 1:125-150 or at least making sure that you as IT leadership keeps your OWN ratio closer to that.