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Predicting Staff Sizes to Maintain Networks
2001 Award Winner
Lon D. Gowen, The MITRE Corporation
ABSTRACT
MITRE completed a three-month study to assess the state of the practice in staffing levels for maintaining a computer-networking infrastructure (CNI). The state of the practice was determined by looking at technical papers on the subject, conducting organizational and technical-expert surveys, and looking at software models that attempt to predict staffing levels. There were very few quantitative heuristics available in the literature; however, the data did show that typical CNIs have a 1:42 ratio of support staff to users. That is, one full-time equivalent of CNI staffing per 42 users for a typical CNI. This number can vary, up or down, by 17 percent or more depending on the details of the CNI. The Department of Defense, as well as the private sector, can use the results of this study to predict initial CNI support levels, to support their current level of staffing, or to justify an increase or decrease in staffing. Additionally, this paper breaks down CNI support into four major areas: systems administration, hardware maintenance, help desk, and configuration management, and provides ratios for predicting each of them within a typical CNI.
» Download Paper [PDF, 219KB]
Publication
Published in 2001. CrossTalk: The Journal of Defense Software Engineering, Vol. 14, No. 11, pp. 22-26.
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