The IT landscape has changed dramatically in the last few years. With the advancement in cloud technologies, many jobs are becoming irrelevant and it’s easier than ever to scale your company. Today it is possible to smoothly transition from a small business into a multi thousand employee enterprise without increasing your IT staff a hundred-fold. The key is to hire the right people.
Historically, staffing is based on workload. The more employee, system or location you needed to support, the more people you needed. In the new world the main driver is skills and knowledge. You should be hiring because you need a certain knowledge, or you want to expand the organization’s capacity to explore or make new ways. Roles in a modern IT organization align with problems that need to be solved not with things that need to be done.
Installing computers is one of those problems that need to be aligned. Let’s say you need to install windows on 3000 computers in 2 weeks. There are three different ways to do this.
The first way is to get an usb or cd and install it on each computer. This takes around 2 hours each per computer but of course you can start computers in parallel and complete around 50 computers a day per person. To complete the job in two weeks you need 6 people (3000⁄10*50).
The second way is to use SCCM installation. SCCM is a specialized tool to install computers. For this solution, you will need at least one person skilled with SCCM. You still need to have less skilled workers to unpack the computers and connect them to a network cable. To install a computer with SCCM will take less than one hour, however you can connect 47 computers to high performance switch and install them in parallel. A single unskilled worker can install around 250 computers a day. One SCCM guru and 2 people can complete 3000 computers in two weeks.
The third and most knowledge intensive way is to use autopilot. With autopilot you don’t need to unpack the computers. The computer is shipped directly to the user with the OS installed and the configuration happens over the internet. All you need is a single person knowledgeable in autopilot and a couple of days to set it up. It doesn’t matter if you have 3000 or 30000 computers, a single person will be enough if he is sufficiently skilled to set this technology up.
The right staffing approach is to hire somebody who can implement autopilot. It is more cost effective and more efficient compared to the other two options. In general, you should be hiring for skill and only accept specialists with the ability to execute with minimal supervision. If you don’t have the resources to find and hire this talent then the other viable option is to hire a consultant who implements. If you prefer to keep self-reliant you can expand your internal talent pool by professional trainings and investment in sandboxes to build muscle around executing.
In many cases the old wisdom of many hands make light work is not true anymore. You really must have a handful of skilled people. Most of the heavy lifting is done by technology so it’s all about the people who can choose and implement those technologies.
In the second a third example it’s clear you have a new problem how to find that skilled person. This leads to a completely different team structure. You are not building a pyramid of people where you have a lots of less experienced staff managed by more experienced people led by even more experienced ones. Companies don’t innovate. People working at the company innovate.
With the power of cloud and self-service you can have a single person installing operating systems on hundreds of computers, however, you need to have the right talent with the right knowledge to achieve that. Alternatively, you can take the old way and have 50 people working around the clock to install the same amount of computers.