My name is Justine Nguyen, Director of Desktop Support hereat CNET Networks, and I'm here to talk to you today about users to tech supportratio. We've been experiencing explosive growth here at CNET Networks, hiringemployees left and right. And of course in order to provide support to thoseemployees and their computers, I've had to ask for more technicians. There'ssome complicated math that might go into that, but there's some good rule ofthumbs which I wanted to share with you today.
So the first thing, before you do any calculations is youhave to take into account at least three things. The first thing is complexity.This involves your environment complexity, how many laptops versus desktops areyou using? How many operating systems are in your environments, as well as theproblem complexity-generally how involved are the problems, how hard are theyto solve or how easy are they to solve?
The second thing you have to take into account is expertise.This would mean your technician expertise, how much they'll need to knowtechnically to solve the problems in your environment as well as your userexpertise, how well do they know how to use the hardware and the software thatthey need to be productive.
The third thing that you do need to take into account istrends. Do some trend analysis of your problems. You'll see spikes and dips aswhen problems occur. Make sure that you're staffed up during those time periodsto accommodate those, whether it's during a software release, a new hardwarerollout, or hiring spikes.
So the basic rule of thumb in terms of user to support ratiois 60 users to one technician. Now there are a lot of things that can influencethis number. How many remote users do you have? Do the technicians have directaccess to those machines or not? Do your technicians have to walk a longdistance to get to users? Is there a lot of software testing done in yourenvironment?
So I picked out six things that definitely influenced myrecommendation. I'm going to share those with you. So the first one is if youhave more than one operating system and no hardware standards in yourenvironment-that means you're using Mac, Linux, various versions ofWindows-your ratio is going to be reduced to 45 employees to one technician.That's a reduction of 15 employees per technician that can be supported.
However, you can increase the number of employees that eachtechnician supports. For example, you can use restricted local administratorrights on machines. If you do this, your ratio will increase from 60 to one to70 to one. That's plus ten employees that are supported by each technician.
Another thing you can do is restrict local administrativerights completely. However, this will only increase your support ratio by five.For some reason, power users who don't have administrative rights to theirmachine it involves more work for your technician.
A big productivity factor that you can have is to use remotesoftware deployment, whether it's SMS, Alteris, LanDesk. If you do this, yourratio will increase by 20 to one. That means that you will have an 80 to oneratio of employees to technicians.
Another thing that will really increase productivity isimaging or cloning, whether you're using Ghost-you don't want technicians tospend a lot of time building machines by hand. So this will increase the ratioby 15 to one.
Another good tool is remote control, going back to thedistance a technician has to travel to provide support. Remote control toolswill increase your ratio by 15 to one. So remember the rule of thumb we startedwith was 60 to one. Now there are a lot of things which will make that numbersmaller. However, if you implement standards, policies, invest in some softwarewhich will increase technician productivity, you can add up all of these ratioincreases and receive a ratio of 125 employees to one technician.
