ITs a Jungle Out There

January 15, 2008 4:27 PM

What's a reasonable size/makeup for an IT department/Software development shop? more inside...

I work at a small international company. $50 million in revenue annually. 400 or so salaried employees globally, the vast majority of whom are sales/business development people.

We have 2 help desk support guys who are responsible for supporting/procuring hardware and software throughout the organization (15 worldwide offices). In this sense, software means anything we've purchased/implemented. Computers, Phones, File servers, Backup systems, Exchange 2007, SharePoint, MS Office, DNS, Accounting Software, Terminal Services etc. They are effectively doing the jobs of: Exchange Admins, DBAs, Network Admins, Sys Admins, Helpdesk Support.

On the software development side of things, our sales people love telling clients we produce several "enterprise class" software products with tons of fancy functionality conforming to all sorts of exciting standards. By several I mean five products that are supposed to be under active development, or when a client pays, customized development. Additionally there are 2 high volume websites which need constant maintenance and have an active queue of new features/functionality/support to be added/associated with them. Staff for all of this consists of 2 lead developers (one of which is the IT manager and is constantly involved in all aspects of "IT") and 2 junior level programmers. At the same time, there are several large "strategic projects" (internal software to improve process) that are planned for this year, and we've been informed that the preference is to have our internal software development team take care of the majority of the work on them. Does this seem about right to you? Because it seems ridiculous to me.

I feel that:
- No one gives a hoot about the quality of the products we are producing until there is a customer driven problem (usually "product a doesn't work as advertised issue")
- I am not able to apply best practices in the timelines given, and as a result producing code/products I am not proud of.
- I feel like I have ADD from context switching every 15 minutes to put out fires, take phone calls, etc.

That said, what's a reasonable sized team for taking care of a company this size from the IT side of things, with a similar amount of projects going on? I shit you not, before I got here, there was no version control system in place for ANY code. This is my first "real" job out of college so I don't know I'm just a whiny imp or this is how it's going to be everywhere? Any battle stories are appreciated and will be sympathized with, ways to enlighten management on what the difference is between support and software development highly revered, and any hard numbers concerning team size/costs would be incredibly helpful to me. Follow ups questions to [e-mail] Thanks!

posted by anonymous to work & money (6 comments total)

As someone who's worked in software development for 20 years or so, that strikes me as a ridiculously understaffed situation, but I can only offer sympathy and have no comps to offer. Find another place to work - you're obviously undervalued where you are.
posted by anadem at 5:49 PM on January 15, 2008

I'm about 3 years out into the industry, and whilst this sort of situation appears to be somewhat common, it's bad.

From what you're saying, I'd expect a team of helpdesk - at least 4-5 people. Then perhaps 2-3 sysadmins to deal with infrastructure (like the servers, etc). As for development - I would have thought a team of around 10 people (plus a technical manager) would have been the minimum. So, for a heavy IT-based company (eg, one selling IT products/sites) I would expect an IT department of around 20 people, including mangement, in 3 teams: support, sysadmin, dev, appropriately supported by management (ie, managment doing *only* management, not tech work).

I'd expect it to be *workable* (barely) with about 15 (good and experienced) people, including at least one person dedicated to putting out infrastructure fires.

With the current team you have? No chance. You aren't superhuman. And you'd need to be.
posted by ysabet at 6:00 PM on January 15, 2008

That's crazy. Not only is that a lot for 4 people to be responsible for, and a very small pool of people to generate creative solutions with, but there's a basic case for redundancy being important in a $50mil/year business. If one of you quits, catches pneumonia, goes on vacation, etc. you're down to 75% capacity—probably less than 75%, since you'll all be more than sub-optimal thanks to the stress. The lynchpin of this entire 400 employee company is 4 people who could get in a car accident on the way back from lunch?
posted by mumkin at 6:35 PM on January 15, 2008

It depends heavily on the level of automation and talent that's involved. 4 good people supporting a fleet of identically provisioned PCs can get more done than a dozen average people supporting a hodge-podge.

My company does about the same revenue, with about half the employees. We have ONE full-time IS person, and a couple of people that support him part-time. But they don't have any sort of development to do, simply supporting servers, infrastructure and desktops.
posted by gjc at 7:32 PM on January 15, 2008

You work for a company that seems to lack a basic commitment to the product and their own infrastructure. I'd start looking for another job, before you burn out completely.
posted by cali at 9:20 PM on January 15, 2008

My initial reaction, just for the software development piece of the pie, is also around 10.

Best practices would indicate that you need 1) staff on the front end talking to customers (or your sales team as customer-proxies) and then creating specifications for the products and features, 2) staff to do the actual designing and coding, and 3) staff to provide independent verification testing - that is the folks who test that the product meets the requirements are neither the specifiers nor the designers/coders. That's probably 2/3/2 = 7. Add to that a manager, and general support staff.

Been doing large software development for 25 years, mostly in the front end, for a large corporation selling hardware and software to other large corporations, to be used by the general public. YMMV.
posted by johnvaljohn at 12:01 PM on January 16, 2008