PC Technician's work load

Seems like this (or a similar) question pops up about once a week. It?s a hard one for many IT managers to grapple with. On the one hand, you obviously don?t want bunches of people sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting for something to happen. On the other hand you don?t want the network walls to come crashing down when 1 of your only 2 outstanding techs is on vacation.

Unfortunately, there is no single, good answer that anyone can give you other than ?it depends.? You will certainly see some numbers that other people have read or heard about, but those numbers tend to be averages industry wide, or for a certain business sector.

Okay, you say. What does it depend on?

Some the things to take into account:
Age and complexity of the hardware
Age and complexity of the software
Presence or lack of proprietary hardware or software
Level of computer knowledge of users
Number of locations to support

What do your techs? current workloads look like?

The older or more proprietary the hardware, the more support is needed. The same goes for software. And the big one, the less comfortable users are with (or knowledgeable about) technology, the greater your support task.

Some possible solutions to easing the work load:

Try and determine what percentage of your tech's time is dedicated to solving "how do I..." types of problems. If the same questions or types of questions keep popping up, it may be worth the effort to create some sort of user education program.

Depending on if (or how) your out sites are clustered, it may be worthwhile to dedicate a tech to several clustered sites and possibly base him at one of those sites instead of your primary site.
(continued)

Tim covered some of these already, but here's my take. How are you utilizing your current technology to maximize your tech's productivity?

Some keys to focus in on are: (Streamlining)

Are your computers all fitting into a "Less than 5" standard hardware configuration? If not, begin budgeting for this. Put in your next year, and eatch some headaches go away. Purchase solid business machines from a reputable vendor (Compaq, hhmmm) every Year, replacing 1/3 of your hardware each year, this will make your tech purchasing a little more consistent. You can stretch it out further if you need to once you have the cycle rolling.

Norton Ghost: Once you have a plan set up for hardware standards, think about software standards. Do all your systems have the exact same software requirements? If so, then you have it easy. Use Symantec Ghost to create "core load" ghost images of the computers to ease re-build times if something goes wrong. Make sure users aren't storing business critical data on their hard drives, for that risk alone... Make sure you have redundant drives in your servers, and backups, etc... You probably already have this, but if not, thenyou have to know this.

As for Support concerns: Do you have a call tracking database? If not, MS Access can be a great tool for this. Send your tech to a couple of classes on Access, and ask him to design a DB for call tracking. Once you have that in place, and the tech logs ALL OF THEIR CALLS, then you will have a tool to move forward to....