Tech to end user ratio

There really is no baseline. It depends on your organization. From what I've read, 1-to-175 may not be out of line. Check out these recent discussions and an article on the subject.

https://www.techrepublic.com/forumdiscuss/thread_detail.jhtml?thread_id=65773

https://www.techrepublic.com/forumdiscuss/thread_detail.jhtml?thread_id=77626

https://www.techrepublic.com/article.jhtml?id=r00620000922kia01.htm

When you get to the discussions, click on the Print icon. This won't actually print anything, but it will open the whole thread in a new window, making it easier to read.

Don't know of any industry "standard" or "baseline." You will find many discussions, articles, white papers, etc. about what works (or doesn't work) for a given for a given company or business area.

There are many factors that can go in to determining what might be right for your situation:

Do support techs support hardware, software, or both?
Level of computer "savvy" of users
Level of complexity of programs being used
Number of different programs being used
Age of hardware
Complexity of hardware
Level of knowledge and experience of techs
Site layout; Do techs make desk calls?
Probably the biggest factor - how much can the business afford to pay for internal support?

You need to do a workload analysis for your particularenvironment. If your one tech is managing to keep your users happy without working LOTS of overtime, your ratio is working for you. If your tech is putting in 60-70 hr weeks on a regular basis and is still falling behind, you need to do further analysis to determine the root cause, but he probably needs help.

What's the right number? It all varies on the particular user, and particular situation. I've seen one case where the team I was on assigned one person to support one user. In this situation, this was the correct number. The 1 user was quite difficult to work with, and this person was comfortable with them - nobody else had experience on their systems and he did, and nobody else had the proper access to their environment. The critical nature of the assignment warranted the level of support.

So, it all varies.

Here's how I would view this question:

How critical are the users involved
What specialized skills are required

let's start there and then see what you need.

No, there isn't. That is because there is no industry standard for what entails "onsite desktop support."

When I managed a help desk in an Army organization, we had one tech per dozen people in garrison, where we were responsible for hardware, software, and some domain admin duties, and our customers more or less knew how to use their computers.

When we went to the field, the ratio dropped to about one tech per 50 people, because we added customers, but in the field we were responsiblefor everything from the satellite dish to the keyboard (hardware, software, network, cabling, e-mail, web, VTC, and security, running 2 12-hour shifts per day), with customers who ran the full range of proficiency.

The result was that we were always busy, but could spend 15% of our time in garrison to practice and train for what we did in the field.

Thus, it depends on what your people do, and how much help the customers need.

Don