IT time forMaintenance

[Guest]

I have several questions pertaining to maintenance and programs on 2
predominantly XP Home networks that exist in 2 physically separate buildings
with no servers. As I know that XP Home cannot log in to a domain, the domain
that we do have is not used. User groups are set up with no permissions set
and all users have Admin accounts. This was not my choice, but came from the
Executive Director who has no understanding nor does she want to understand
the repercussions of such settings on the computers.
1. How much time should be allotted to do backups on each computer? There
are a total of 65 between the 2 physically separate networks. Some computers
have CD burning capabilities, some do not.
2. How much time should be allotted to install programs on these computers?
3. How much time should be allotted to provide instruction to employees,
clients on the use of these programs i.e. Office and basic computer
operation? Keeping in mind that 90% are not computer literate.
4. How much time and how often should be allowed for maintenance.
5. How often should it be preformed?
6. How much time should be allotted for repair and re-installations of
programs?

The reason that I ask is that I need to be able to document to some extent
the time that is normally required for these task per some sort of industry
standards.
I understand that there are probably no hard answers for these questions but
perhaps there is some type of guidance that can be provided.

 

[Kerry Brown]

I have several questions pertaining to maintenance and programs on 2
predominantly XP Home networks that exist in 2 physically separate
buildings
with no servers. As I know that XP Home cannot log in to a domain, the
domain
that we do have is not used. User groups are set up with no permissions
set
and all users have Admin accounts. This was not my choice, but came from
the
Executive Director who has no understanding nor does she want to
understand
the repercussions of such settings on the computers.
1. How much time should be allotted to do backups on each computer? There
are a total of 65 between the 2 physically separate networks. Some
computers
have CD burning capabilities, some do not.
2. How much time should be allotted to install programs on these
computers?
3. How much time should be allotted to provide instruction to employees,
clients on the use of these programs i.e. Office and basic computer
operation? Keeping in mind that 90% are not computer literate.
4. How much time and how often should be allowed for maintenance.
5. How often should it be preformed?
6. How much time should be allotted for repair and re-installations of
programs?

The reason that I ask is that I need to be able to document to some extent
the time that is normally required for these task per some sort of
industry
standards.
I understand that there are probably no hard answers for these questions
but
perhaps there is some type of guidance that can be provided.

You are asking for a couple of days of free consultation. I don't think
you'll find the answer here. Someone with the knowledge and experience to
give the answer would have to spend some time at your sites to answer your
questions. You can do a lot of the research needed to make a case for
Windows Server and Active Directory here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/directory/activedirectory/default.mspx

Another solution can be found here:

http://www.novell.com/solutions/workgroup/index.html?sourceidint=hp_solutions_workgroup

Your current situation is an administrative nightmare. Your costs will
skyrocket as computers become infected with malware and users make
unauthorised changes or install unauthorised software. With 65 computers
spread over two sites you need some kind of central management or you will
have no control over support costs.

Kerry

 

[Guest]

I ask only for some ideas and guidance in this as I have to start somewhere
and I have no idea where. The Executive Director has allotted 10 hours for
this work to be done by1 person and I have no way to argue that other than by
information that I can get from other people that manage networks.
Yes I know that the management of those networks is a virtual nightmare and
will probably fail. That is why I am asking for information to backup my
arguement.

 

[Kerry Brown]

I ask only for some ideas and guidance in this as I have to start somewhere
and I have no idea where. The Executive Director has allotted 10 hours for
this work to be done by1 person and I have no way to argue that other than
by
information that I can get from other people that manage networks.
Yes I know that the management of those networks is a virtual nightmare
and
will probably fail. That is why I am asking for information to backup my
arguement.

You'll have to do some research yourself. The links in my last post are a
good starting point for making a case for some kind of network management.
You can download case studies that have cost/benefit analyses.

There are no standard times. Just take the backups for instance. What
software? What speed CDRW drive? How much data needs to be backed up? What
is the CPU? The list goes on and on.

If you only have ten hours you may want to focus on only one part of the
problem and make a business case for that part of the problem only. The
biggest financial gains will probably be backup related. Some things to
consider. How many man hours would be lost if some crucial data was lost or
took a few days to restore? In your current situation it is very likely that
data will be lost. You are relying on each individual to backup their own
data. My experience is that less than 10% will backup their data
consistently let alone make sure the backup actually worked. If each
individual's data is not that crucial then look to a different part of the
problem. Malware/spyware and users installing unauthorised software e.g. P2P
or IM software would probably be next on the list. Both types of software
waste employee time, company resources, and are a major vector for malware
infection if not managed properly. If a network aware virus gets on your
system you would have to shut the whole system down to fix it. How many lost
man hours will this cost?

Kerry

 

[Guest]

Hi Kerry
I am doing the research to the best of my ability. I have no experience in
making any type of time budgets for an IT department as I have never run into
this type of situation.
One of the reasons I posted here was from the information that I have read,
on various sites and publications it seems most IT departments are not
allocated enough funds or manpower. This seems to hold true especially in the
NON Profit sector. I wanted to see if other IT departments have solutions
that they have created, if so what they were and if I could modify those to
fit this situation.
I appreciate your time and information.
Thanks

 

[Kerry Brown]

Hi Kerry
I am doing the research to the best of my ability. I have no experience in
making any type of time budgets for an IT department as I have never run
into
this type of situation.
One of the reasons I posted here was from the information that I have
read,
on various sites and publications it seems most IT departments are not
allocated enough funds or manpower. This seems to hold true especially in
the
NON Profit sector. I wanted to see if other IT departments have solutions
that they have created, if so what they were and if I could modify those
to
fit this situation.
I appreciate your time and information.
Thanks

I understand where you are coming from. I do contract work for several
non-profit societies. Some as large as > 50 pc's to as small as a couple of
pc's. You may want to look at calling in a local consultant. I always give
non-profits a break. Many consultants do likewise.

Kerry

 

[Guest]

I would like to do that but there are circumstances that I'd rather not post
involved.
So I'll keep looking
Thanks again

 

[Galen]

In Trish <[email protected]> had this to say:

My reply is at the bottom of your sent message:

I would like to do that but there are circumstances that I'd rather
not post involved.
So I'll keep looking
Thanks again

Having read the thread my advice is to take the response to your executive
director telling them that without an AD (or some very expensive
alternative) that the time allowed (ten hours for that many PCs in two
separate locations) is simply not enough. You'd do better with that amount
of time using an intensive two hour per day training course for the people
using the PCs teaching them how to do it themselves. In fact, I can think of
no other use for that ten hours. 10 hours + 1 person? At best you'd be able
to image the drive, clean it, and maybe get a half dozen done if you ran
around from PC to PC - sliding about on your magical chair - and would
likely quit by the time the third hour was over. Those ten hours would be
better of training, establishing policy, and getting the end-users to do it
on their own.

--
Galen - MS MVP - Windows (Shell/User & IE)

"You know that a conjurer gets no credit when once he has explained his
trick; and if I show you too much of my method of working, you will
come to the conclusion that I am a very ordinary individual after all."

Sherlock Holmes

 

[Guest]

Galen,
Thank you for your response, I have said that, but it fell on deaf ears.
I used to have 32 hours to do all the aforsaid mentioned duties, plus the
very simple website and teaching classes. But now I do not. I was trying to
figure out exactly how many man hours were needed to do the list of duties.
32 was not enough most of the time.
My magical chair was not fast enough.
I mentioned a class for the employees but that was vetoed. It was simpler to
call me and have me do it as far as they were concerned.
I have tried to envolve management in all aspects but they decline and tell
me to "do my job". I was trying to put together the hours on paper so I could
submit it to them,hoping that they would understand it better in that way. I
really just don't know at this point what I should do.
Thank you for your information

 

[Kerry Brown]

Galen,
Thank you for your response, I have said that, but it fell on deaf ears.
I used to have 32 hours to do all the aforsaid mentioned duties, plus the
very simple website and teaching classes. But now I do not. I was trying
to
figure out exactly how many man hours were needed to do the list of
duties.
32 was not enough most of the time.
My magical chair was not fast enough.
I mentioned a class for the employees but that was vetoed. It was simpler
to
call me and have me do it as far as they were concerned.
I have tried to envolve management in all aspects but they decline and
tell
me to "do my job". I was trying to put together the hours on paper so I
could
submit it to them,hoping that they would understand it better in that way.
I
really just don't know at this point what I should do.
Thank you for your information

Trish

It's a tough sell but I think that making a business case showing how
investing more money now will save money in the future is the way to go.
Present a few disaster scenarios and show how much time and money will be
saved during the recovery by having proper systems and management in place.
Non technical people have a hard time understanding why it costs so much to
look after a network. As soon as the budget gets tight IT is cut. The
rational is it's working now so it's good enough. If you put it in terms of
what can happen to a poorly managed network and what it will cost the
organisation to fix it when it fails (including indirect costs like lost
production when the network is down) it is easier to sell. The thought of 65
people sitting around for two days while a network aware virus is removed
should scare them. If it doesn't then you might want to start looking
elsewhere for employment.

Good luck, Kerry

 

[Guest]

Tell them that an indepentent contrator will charge at least 75$ hr and a
minimum of two hours per pc.

 

[Michael W. Ryder]

I have several questions pertaining to maintenance and programs on 2
predominantly XP Home networks that exist in 2 physically separate buildings
with no servers. As I know that XP Home cannot log in to a domain, the domain
that we do have is not used. User groups are set up with no permissions set
and all users have Admin accounts. This was not my choice, but came from the
Executive Director who has no understanding nor does she want to understand
the repercussions of such settings on the computers.
1. How much time should be allotted to do backups on each computer? There
are a total of 65 between the 2 physically separate networks. Some computers
have CD burning capabilities, some do not.
2. How much time should be allotted to install programs on these computers?
3. How much time should be allotted to provide instruction to employees,
clients on the use of these programs i.e. Office and basic computer
operation? Keeping in mind that 90% are not computer literate.
4. How much time and how often should be allowed for maintenance.
5. How often should it be preformed?
6. How much time should be allotted for repair and re-installations of
programs?

The reason that I ask is that I need to be able to document to some extent
the time that is normally required for these task per some sort of industry
standards.
I understand that there are probably no hard answers for these questions but
perhaps there is some type of guidance that can be provided.

A good starting point would be to attach a large external drive to one
of the PCs or the network in each location and backup all the PCs to it.
You can either use the backup software of your choice or XCOPY in a
batch file. Once you configure the backup to run after hours that will
eliminate a huge nightmare. Having everyone backup their own PC is not
going to work and having to find CDs for those with burners is just
another problem.
Next I would install a good firewall, like Sygate or ZoneAlarm, and an
anti-virus program on each computer. This will limit the damage done by
any malware entering the network.
Once these steps are taken the day to day maintenance should be mostly
eliminated and you can concentrate on training and fixing the few
problems that appear. Any free time can be used to checking and
cleaning the interior of the PCs.

 

[Guest]

Hi Kerry,
I did a disaster cost breakdown and they thought I was nuts. 1 day after I
went to work there the network was hit by lightening and for a week there was
no network. They couldn't do payroll, etc because of that. It took me a week
to install new Cat 5, routers, switches etc. But still they think that I am
nuts when I do the disaster breakdown. The other point I was trying get
across to management was network security, they have clients that use some of
the computers and the employees have shared files with no permissions set ( I
wasn't allowed to do that). There is personal information that the clients
could access that would give them the information for ID theft. I have tried
to explain the laws about personal information protection byt it fell on deaf
ears. I figured it was a mater of time before that happened and there would
only be my butt on the line.

By the way I have already figured out that I don't need those headaches
anymore but I still have to submit a breakdown of man power hours for the IT
department.
I suppose I'll have to go to some sort of school to get cert in these areas
as I am just a self taught indivdual. But I think that would be better than
this mess.
Thanks again

 

[Galen]

In Trish <[email protected]> had this to say:

My reply is at the bottom of your sent message:

Galen,
Thank you for your response, I have said that, but it fell on deaf
ears.
I used to have 32 hours to do all the aforsaid mentioned duties, plus
the very simple website and teaching classes. But now I do not. I was
trying to figure out exactly how many man hours were needed to do the
list of duties. 32 was not enough most of the time.
My magical chair was not fast enough.
I mentioned a class for the employees but that was vetoed. It was
simpler to call me and have me do it as far as they were concerned.
I have tried to envolve management in all aspects but they decline
and tell me to "do my job". I was trying to put together the hours on
paper so I could submit it to them,hoping that they would understand
it better in that way. I really just don't know at this point what I
should do.
Thank you for your information

I hope you do not take this the wrong way nor think that I'm being sarcastic
but give them your letter of resignation ASAP. The day management put me in
charge of a job and then tells me how to do it WHEN they lack the
technological ability to know the task well enough is the day I resolve to
get a new position in an alternate company. (Fortunately no longer an issue
as I'm happily retired at an early age.)

"You may either tell me what to do or how to do it but certainly not both
until you have the capacity to understand the nature of the task and all
that it entails." I don't suppose it would help, from what you've described,
but I'd take this thread - all of it in it's entirety - and forward it to
your boss(es) and give an offering of your resignation. You aren't a
superhero, what you're asking to do is impossible without the proper setup.
Even then - it's going to take LONGER than ten hours initially. Tell 'em
that you'll take all the year's ten hours right now and try it if they want
but what they're asking is physically impossible (at two hours per PC)
without somewhere near 130 man-hours and THAT is still rushing it for it to
be done properly. At 65 PCs with 10 hours that gives you what, about 9
minutes and 20 seconds or so per PC?

A final option... Call your local community college that has a technical
school with a computer program. Contact the head of the comp sci program.
See if they'd like to come in. It's been done before. <g>

--
Galen - MS MVP - Windows (Shell/User & IE)

"You know that a conjurer gets no credit when once he has explained his
trick; and if I show you too much of my method of working, you will
come to the conclusion that I am a very ordinary individual after all."

Sherlock Holmes

 

[Star Fleet Admiral Q]

FWIW - I own/maintain 4 PC's at home, 1 Workstation with Win2k3 Standard
Server, 1 Workstation with XP Pro, a Laptop with XP Pro and a vintage
Desktop running Fedora Core 4 (Linux variety), and to be honest, I spend
more than 10 hours a week on maintenance/backup myself (sometimes a lot more
when it is Service Pack or security fix release time), and I use Norton
Ghost to do my backups on the Windows machines, and a BASH shell script to
backup my Linux machine using tar/gzip. The machines are all have some type
of software firewall (ZoneAlarm Pro for the Windows boxes) and AV software
(AVG for Windows and F-Prot for Linux), along with all the Windows machines
having Lavasoft Adaware and SpyBot Search&Destroy, along with ZoneAlarm
Pro's spy catcher for the malware, spyware, etc varieties of prevention, and
I really don't much worry about the Linux box where spyware is concerned, as
I rarely hit the Internet with it.
The windows machines themselves all have a variety of Office, either Office
2k, Office XP (2k2) or Office 2k3 on them, and my Server workstation is used
for development, with SQL2k, VS.NET2k3, Perl, and other tools, along with my
Linux machine being used for development, all in coordination with my
Personal and Work related needs - note I do work for a large company with
its own IT Systems and Applications department, I being a member of the
latter. But 10 hours for 65 PC's in 2 locations, well to be honest, either
the management would listen or I would have walked long ago, I don't care if
they are non-profit or not, their alternative after you leave is consultants
or some high-school grad who thinks he knows it all, and even with
consultant discounted rates for charity, charge more weekly than most
employee's weekly salary by a factor of 3-4.
My advice, either they budge or you continue to do your best, act friendly,
happy and content (it may also require overtime out your own pocket to keep
management off your case) and on the side find another employer - once
you're gone, there will be a change of some type, but sometimes that is what
has to take place before change will happen.

 

[cquirke (MVP Windows shell/user)]

OK...

OK; there are upsides as well as downsides there.

As far as possible, I automate everything up to the "last mile" to CDR
or DVDR, via Tasks. To do this, I:

1) Identify and isolate core data
- typically the "My Documents" object, but...
- move bulky Music, Pictures, Videos out of there
- move risky My Received Files, IE downloads etc. out of there
- identify other data locations, e.g. custom LOB apps

2) Batch file to archive this material to location elsewhere on HD

3) Set up a Task to run that batch file, e.g. at 02:00

4) Read-only share the location holding the backup archives

5) Set up Task e.g. at 04:00 to pull most recent backups to backup PC

6) "Last mile" dump of these backups to CDR or DVDR

If material is too big, revisit de-bulking at step (1). Bonus points
for whatever logging your batch file can manage, because you will get
various failures when:
- PCs are not on
- HDs run out of space
- Tasks do not run (pwd change, logout)
- data filesare "in use" and stall backup

With 65 systems, one backup system may be unlikely to manage the
capacity of all the data; you may want to split up into logical
workgroups, each with its own backup manager.

That depends - it's a trade-off between spending time once, to create
an automated roll-out, vs. doing it ad-hoc on each PC. At 65 systems,
it may well be worthwhile exploring pro-IT approaches to automated
rollout as well as system imaging, etc.

GIGO applies here; the more you put in, the more you get out, until
the point of diminishing returns sets in. Some folks attempt to
side-step the need for user clue by "locking down" everything, and
controlling all workstations from a central point.

Some stuff I wrote long ago (in the Win9x era) may apply; see...

http://cquirke.mvps.org/9x/dataman.htm

....and PageDown past all the partitioning stuff until you get to
backup policies, etc. A key thing is a policy that defines events for
which tech support should be called.

Industry standards vary, starting from the abysmal baselines set by
large OEMs, to very fine-grained control used within some enterprises.

My gut feeling is that 65 PCs starts to look like a job description;
maybe not full-time, but one that represents enough regular work for
the site to consider either an in-house employee or out-source
contract. If they pay on an ad-hoc per-crisis basis, they may pay
more. The trick is how to cost such a contract, set SLA, etc.