Engineer headcount calculations

Fri Jun 24 13:19:35 UTC 2005

Yes I agree, this is a topic that comes up time and time again in my 
conversations with other network managers, however I have yet to hear a 
clear way.

Luke

>I don't think it is the greatest approach so I am curious to hear if
>there is some better ways of doing it.
>
>Glenn
>
>
>
>On 6/23/05, Luke Parrish <lukep at centurytel.net> wrote:
> >
> > Measuring a customer service rep's time on a daily basis is a pretty easy
> > and straightforward task. You can get down to the minute by minute level of
> > how a CSR spends their time each day. You can also easily relate that back
> > to customer growth which gives you how many CSR's you need for your next
> > budget year. CSR's have a set of tasks to complete that rarely change day
> > to day.
> >
> > However, what about a network engineer?
> >
> > A day in the life of an engineer:
> >
> > outage resolution
> > proactive projects(some 2 hours and some 300 hours)
> > reactive projects(some 2 hours and some 300 hours)
> > customer escalation
> > escalated network issue
> > maintenance windows
> > writing/researching change management
> > time spent in lab researching network issues
> > turning up new service
> > planning for new service
> > turning down old service
> > taking phone calls from internal business units needing support
> > configuring interfaces for new dedicated customers
> > ip administration(sometimes 3 minutes per request sometimes 2 days of
> > justification on a request)
> > equipment upgrades
> > TAC research
> > equipment evaluation
> > reports
> > shipping equipment
> > boxing equipment
> > meetings
> >
> > etc etc etc etc etc etc, everyone knows where I am going.
> >
> > So the million dollar question, how do you account for their time to prove
> > in a business case that you need to add additional headcount. If you plan
> > on adding 110,000 DSL subs next year then we all know that we have to add
> > engineers to support the network that will have to be built. However, how
> > do you prove that with numbers?
> >
> > I can say, I have to turn up 250 new DSLAMs, 60 new routers, 18 new
> > internet drains, etc etc which I can easily relate back to manhours for
> > turnup. However how do you allocate manhours to maintenance of the network?
> > There are some easy ones, 1 IOS upgrade a year times number of devices on
> > the network, 1 bandwidth upgrade per year times number of CO's, etc etc.
> > But what about the day to day that I listed above?
> >
> > We have to sell this idea to accountants, not other engineers, they only
> > see numbers on paper. Its easy to all of us, we know how many people we
> > need, but how do you put a business case together to sell it?
> >
> > Can anyone out there share what type of system they use to account for
> > engineers time, or really any insight at all would be helpful.
> >
> > One answer would be a system that the engineer would open and close time
> > based tickets everytime they made a move during the day. However I dont
> > know many network engineers at the enable level that are restricted this
> > way, however it is an option.
> >
> > luke
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >

Luke Parrish
Centurytel Internet Operations
318-330-6661