How to staff or bugdet an IT dept

[Former Member]

How large should your IT dept be? and how do jusitfy when an additional resource should be added? versus outsourcing or consulting.

I know there are so many variations and so many exceptions but are there some general guidelines? Like employed IT staff should be X% of revenue?

with so many companies doing the new dimension stuff - SCM, CRM, BI so many mid size comapnies try to make the PP person also be the SCM person, SD be CRM person.

[matt]

Your IT department should have one or two employed managers for each team, together with a minimum number of staff members, according to size of the company. The rest should be independent consultants, who you can dispose of at will. Vary the number according workload. That's what I did when I was development manager and it worked very nicely. It was cheaper than employing the extras, or using a consultancy partner. And it wasn't viewed as headcount, just purchase order, so we ended up looking really mean and efficient.

Re: free coffee. In the UK, free coffee is a taxable benefit unless all employees are entitled to it.

[KjetilKilhavn]

How large is a blue lake? Should it be larger, or would it be better if it was even smaller, and perhaps green? Should there be free coffee for everyone, or only for the managers and staff with more than two years of seniority?

So many questions and so few answers.

The IT department should be as large as necessary to handle the average load + 5 percent. How large that turns out to be does of course depend on the importance of IT systems in your business. If the business is IT-driven, it needs to be a relatively large department. If the business is labour-intensive, the IT department will be a relatively small department.

[Former Member]

I agree with everything you say, unfortunately I work in the Dilbert cartoon and have the pointy hair boss. Even coming up with zero trying to Google stuff along these lines.

Is hard to make the upper management realize if you do a portal based, wed CIC, with tons of cool BI reporting it is the same amount of work for IT whether there are 20 users or 200 users....... (except for setting up user id's)

[KjetilKilhavn]

>

> Is hard to make the upper management realize if you do a portal based, wed CIC, with tons of cool BI reporting it is the same amount of work for IT whether there are 20 users or 200 users....... (except for setting up user id's)

The comment I don't love hearing: "True, we said this would never happen. But it only happens very rarely, so it can't be very difficult to handle it, can it?"

[Former Member]

How large is a blue lake? Should it be larger, or would it be better if it was even smaller, and perhaps green?

It should be large enough that a piece of string will go around it, but not quite reach across it.

[Former Member]

more art than science