How can I justify hiring more IT staff?

Question

We have 10 IT staff and it doesn't seem enough. My boss is going to the Exec staff meeting next week and I'm suppose to come up with justification for hiring 5 more people. Help! We have around 500 accounts, write code for 15 web applications and support 300 nodes at 10 sites.
I don't have very much stats on help desk calls or user downtime. Can someone help me when senior management asks, "Why do you need more staff?"

Answer 1

Do you have a list of open requests, including who requested them and an estimated time to complete? That could help. With that, your boss might be able to say something like "here's the list with priorities as we understand them - with current staff, we can get these items (specify which) done in a year - what priorities do you want us to change?"

I sympathize - I spent decades in IT. Non-IT people often don't have a clue what the IT people do - until they don't do it for just one time.

My best suggestion can't be done in a week. Work closely with your users, get to know their business, not just their computer systems and needs, so you can make good suggestions to them to make their lives easier. That's the only way you'll ever really get support for your needs.

Good luck. Been there.

A note of warning - be careful what you wish for. Many years ago my boss, VP of IT, took such a list to exec council and said he needed to hire an additional 30 people to meet the needs - we had about 45 or 50 at the time - to get all their requests done. They said OK. Did you ever try to hire that many qualified people and bring them into having a clue about the organization and its systems in a couple months? It was a disaster - I spent most of a summer interviewing candidates rather than directing much (and by a few months in, conducting many exit interviews also) - my boss got fired that October. It was about a year before we got things back to normal.

Answer 2

Mostly i would have to agree with Dr. Van. Increasing staff opens one up to downsizing in hard times.

But, if you really NEED more staff, then you need to gather the data to support it:
1) Amount of help desks calls.
2) Average Down-time of nodes.
3) Average response time of current staff to problems in network.
4) workload of current staff and amount of backlog.

hope this helps

Answer 3

You'd be wise to let them know that you guys can handle it with what you have. Adding more staff just increases the possiblity that your company will downsize at some point...especially if the workload doesn't increase proportionately.

And downsizing means someone is going to be unemployed...hopefully not you.

Answer 4

To ensure the best service and to sustain growth and profitability. Tell them you are stretched too thin, and to offer the support our clients are used to and deserve, we need to staff accordingly.