Software Engineering - IT Staffing Levels As Companyh Grows

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IT Staffing Levels As Companyh Grows

Bradley K. Sherman

2006-07-14, 4:00 am

If a company increases in size by an order of magnitude, say from 50
to 500, will the IT staff increase faster or slower than the company
as a whole? Yes I know it depends on the type of company and the
reasons for growth, but I am looking for some kind of study, report,
metric or anecdote that ignores nearly everything except growth.

--bks

Phlip

2006-07-14, 4:00 am

Bradley K. Sherman wrote:

> If a company increases in size by an order of magnitude, say from 50
> to 500, will the IT staff increase faster or slower than the company
> as a whole? Yes I know it depends on the type of company and the
> reasons for growth, but I am looking for some kind of study, report,
> metric or anecdote that ignores nearly everything except growth.

A completely unrelated anecdote follows. Nothing at all to do with your
question.

I have forgotten how many times I have worked at a shop where the
programmers were wandering clueless, never releasing, always debugging, and
so on.

And the IT helpdesk shop, by contrast, was amazing. You were _encouraged_ to
write a ticket into their ticket system, no matter how trivial. I once
requested 2 lava lamps, for example, and got them. (Yes, they were for my
project. Yes, the crew asked me and my boss for clearance first.)

The system worked by you write a ticket on a web page. Then the website
picked a random (!) IT crew member to answer the ticket. The member could
forward it, shelve it, bounce it with a request for clarification ("uh, lava
lamps??"), or do it.

The turnaround on this system was, like 20 minutes to change a server's
name, or 5 hours to diagnose your hard drive filling up mysteriously, to 3
days to get a new extra-tall filing cabinet (to put the lamps on).

That's how transaction processing works; a queue, no bottlenecks, and rapid
response.

I would look for a system or anecdote that compares the turn-around time for
a small shop with that of a big one. In theory, the rate of IT department
growth should be _less_ than the rate of the whole site's growth. That's
because the transaction system will simply spreat the IT guys out farther,
without crunching their time.

Read /Slack/ by Tom DeMarco. Also nothing to do with your question.
Whatsoever. Really.

--
Phlip
[url]http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?Z

Land[/url] <-- NOT a blog!!!

JXStern

2006-07-14, 7:58 am

On 14 Jul 2006 00:50:51 -0400, bks@panix.com (Bradley K. Sherman)
wrote:

>If a company increases in size by an order of magnitude, say from 50
>to 500, will the IT staff increase faster or slower than the company
>as a whole? Yes I know it depends on the type of company and the
>reasons for growth, but I am looking for some kind of study, report,
>metric or anecdote that ignores nearly everything except growth.

Hi Bradley,

My information is twenty years old, but would suggest the IT growth
would be about linear with that of the organization, because IT is
(was) usually seen as a fixed percentage of a company's operating
costs.

Economies of scale are neatly offset by bloated bureaucracy, not to
mention larger companies have increased paperwork required by the feds
and a wider variety of products and transactions. Such is life!

J.

Jack Klein

2006-07-15, 3:59 am

On 14 Jul 2006 00:50:51 -0400, bks@panix.com (Bradley K. Sherman)
wrote in comp.software-eng:

> If a company increases in size by an order of magnitude, say from 50
> to 500, will the IT staff increase faster or slower than the company
> as a whole? Yes I know it depends on the type of company and the
> reasons for growth, but I am looking for some kind of study, report,
> metric or anecdote that ignores nearly everything except growth.
>
> --bks

Based on my experience with the empire building tendencies of IT
managers (note, I am not talking about actual IT people who work for a
living), 425 of the 450 new hires will report to the IT manager, if
he/she has anything to say about it.

--
Jack Klein
Home: http://JK-Technology.Com
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H. S. Lahman

2006-07-15, 6:59 pm

Responding to Sherman...

> If a company increases in size by an order of magnitude, say from 50
> to 500, will the IT staff increase faster or slower than the company
> as a whole? Yes I know it depends on the type of company and the
> reasons for growth, but I am looking for some kind of study, report,
> metric or anecdote that ignores nearly everything except growth.

It is really hard to say. In addition to company type and reasons for
growth, it depends upon what the IT staff are responsible for.

For example, the core IT systems -- Payroll, GL, inventory control, etc.
-- will probably scale pretty well with increased volume without
fundamentally changing what they do. So I would expect those areas to
grow linearly at a slower rate than the rest of the company.

At the other extreme, if the IT staff is responsible for providing ad
hoc, highly customized desktop applications for things like data mining
the enterprise database, then IT growth could be at least as great and
possibly greater (because of potential interactions) than growth of the
company as a whole.

Somewhere in between is a POS order entry web site where there will be
ongoing maintenance. If the site itself expands in proportion to the
business growth, you will have a problem. OTOH, if the site is
well-designed and the growth is reflected in things like more item
descriptions, then staff growth may be less because much of the work can
be done outside IT using basic tools that IT already provides.

Finally, there is also the potential for one-time disasters. For
example, I once worked for a company that became a Fortune 500. The
problem was their core accounting software could only handle 9
significant figures for whole dollars and that code was poorly designed
(i.e., difficult to maintain). So moving to the big time triggered
replacement of the entire GL and significant rewriting of other subsystems.

So I don't think studies and metrics will help a lot. I think you have
to look at the various responsibilities of your IT organization
(functional groups) and try to estimate how each will be affected by the
nature of the growth.

*************
There is nothing wrong with me that could
not be cured by a capful of Drano.

H. S. Lahman
hsl@pathfindermda.com
Pathfinder Solutions -- Put MDA to Work
http://www.pathfindermda.com
blog: http://pathfinderpeople.blogs.com/hslahman
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