Help Desk IT people are the front line people you call when you first come across a technology problem. When your computer blue screens, flakes out when you hook up a projector, or when Outlook seems to eat your e-mail. If you dig through research from Gartner, business magazines, and IT management magazines, you can find all sorts of statistics on the correct size of the IT staff for a particular type of business – and most of it is contradictory. I’ve come up with simple guide for the small business owner based on my experience:
If you have less than 10 people in a single office, you probably don’t need a help desk at all. Your network is probably not that complicated and the risk of major incident is relatively low.
Until you exceed 125 people in a single office or exceed more than 75 people in two offices, you don’t need an in house help desk. A business with multiple offices now has a serious network to maintain. They are going to need more support and that means more people and that means more situations where an in house help desk in needed.
For offices in between, an outsourced help desk is the best answer. Level One Help Desk Support is a pretty tough job. You get to deal with pissed off people, people who are in a hurry, and people who are ready to spread the pain. It seems like your IT person is bouncing from one crisis to another. Hiring for people skills is almost as important as technical skills and a small company doesn't offer enough challenge.
Also, a company can’t have a single Help Desk person. Since they are running around putting out fires, they are almost guaranteed to be in the wrong place for the next problem. With an outsourced help desk, they will take care of that but if you bring it in house, there has to be at least a person who has partial help desk responsibilities to reduce risk of “missing” a key incident and to avoid staff burn out.
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