ICT Staff Structure

[mrforgetful]

What is the typical structure of an IT Support deaprtment?

 

What sort of involvment and communication is there between SMT and ICT?

 

We're not usually included in any talks until they've decided.

 

What sort of job role would it be to be involved? What sort of scale etc?

[GrumbleDook]

How many roads must a man walk down?

 

How long is a piece of string?

 

From previous threads on here it is extremely varied.

 

I have attached a pdf of the structure of my place (where I am the equivalent of an assistant head) but we are far from ordinary.

 

If your Senior Management have been on SLICT / TeamSLICT they will know that devolved leadership is vital to effective use and development of ICT / IT across the whole school.

 

Some schools have a small working group who work together to plan and implement the ICT strategy and this can include a member of Senior Management, the Head of ICT (as a discrete subject), the Network Manager / Senior Technician, the Head of department for whatever subject you have a specialism in, key teachers (ASTs, leading practitioners) and key Associate Staff (Data Manager, etc).

 

Some schools have one person with the vision ... and when they have gone you are often left with nothing ... or just the vision of the next person (which may be completely different to the previous version!) ... better to have a 3 - 5 year strategy based around the whole school strategy that has different people looking after the relevant areas.

orgchart_178.pdf

[Butuz]

GrumbleDook that is a very impressive staff structure - made me nice and jealous ready for dinner!

 

Do you mind me asking more about your school. I see your a Tech College, how many pupils / staff / workstations etc do you have roughly?

 

I am doing nearly all of your orgchart.pdf on my own at the moment and it really is not working.

 

Andrew

[bossman]

@Butuz:

We are just a two man team and we too manage everything which is on this orgchart.pdf ):

[webman]

One person, working 20 hours a week, on the lodgeparkctc website? 8O

[localzuk]

Hmm... Our structure is that I deal with everything.

[Oops_my_bad]

So basically Tony, you shove all your tasks onto your NM

 

Nice way to earn a good salary, look good AND do sod all..

[Butuz]

So basically Tony, you shove all your tasks onto your NM

 

Nice way to earn a good salary, look good AND do sod all..

 

Wow!!!! Zero to Ban in 0.3 seconds 8O

 

Butuz

[Grommit]

It works like this where I work

 

I am the Network Manger equal to above an Head of Department.. (just under an Assistant Head)

 

 

My Boss.... the Director of ICT is a member of the SLT and I will sometimes join his at the SLT meetings to discuss issues and projects Teh Head

 

My Technicians work for me

[Vegas]

Grommit, is your salary equivalent to a teaching post ie. Head of Dept?

[CyberNerd]

It would be interesting to evaluate both NM and Head of Department/Assistant Head using the same job evaluation scheme, you'd probably find them comparable, Probably the teaching post would score higher in 'emotional demands' for the job (looking after children) but I suspect the NM would score higher in the breadth of responsibility and the depth of responsibility. Theres also a local demand that can be taken into account, so don't choose a maths/science (in demand) teacher as a comparison if you want to make an equal pay claim.

 

Remember - Equal pay claims can be backdated 6 yrs

[bossman]

I have just been offered the job of SLICT (Strategic Leader of ICT) above the ICT co-ordinator as she does not have the capacity of strategically planning the ICT whole school because she knows nothing about networks and how they operate.

 

The only thing is that I suspect that she as head of ICT dept will be paid more for that than I will for SLICT.

[russdev]

Maybe but can work on pay if nothing else good career move..

 

Russ

[CyberNerd]

@bossman No win, No Fee

Stefan Cross is your man. He's plagued the North East Local Authorities with equal pay wins

[GrumbleDook]

So basically Tony, you shove all your tasks onto your NM

 

Nice way to earn a good salary, look good AND do sod all..

 

I wish ... Stephen has gone and sold out ... he is on a .2 timetable now :-(

 

Yes ... I do not do tech support anymore ... I am manglement. It is a pure figment of people's imagination if I have been in at the weekend unboxing kit and setting up rooms, or patching SIMS.

 

@Butuz

We have 450 desktops, 30 thin clients (rising to 90 in 3 weeks time), 120+ staff laptops, 50+ classroom laptops, 250+ student laptops (this takes up a high proportion of our time).

 

14 physical server and 4 virtual, Cisco WLAN (with controller), ID Cards and door control system,

 

A vanilla setup using WDS (in compatibility mode as we still have a few RIS images left), email is on FirstClass at the moment but we are moving to a hosted Exchange solution (as part of the county MLE), pretty much everything is done in house where possible, except for cabling (been there, crawled through the roof, can't see the point putting the team through it when it works out quicker and is certified by people who do it day in, day out!)

 

The thing that takes up a lot of time? Being flexible and fitting round the school rather than dictating how things should be. This is the thing that worries me about BSF more than anything else ... we try to be flexible and think of ways we can make things better and more effective for staff, not conform to a baseline.

 

We could slim down to a 3 man team (remove AV to just giving departments the kit and let them get on with it, drop the student placement giving us less time to sort problems with the student laptops, don't bother with the website, all take lunchtimes and breaks at the same time, no SLA or helpdesk, no remote access ... ) but I can honestly say that there is never a time when there is not something new to get their teeth into or plan for.

 

The job roles specified are really just a pointer for staff so that they go to a specific person ... that person may delegate it out to someone else if they are busy. At the moment most of the Mac stuff gets delegated to me ... not that I mind ... it is far easier than doing Windows admin really on a per machine ratio in my experience.

[webman]

Tony: If you were to go to the 3-man-team: Why would you have to not bother with the website, have no helpdesk and have no remote access? I don't see how those would be affected by the number of technical staff.

 

From our experience, those are things that are either set in place and are maintained and updated as and when required; or are par of the course as a technical team's duties anyway.

[GrumbleDook]

The website is fairly dynamic (as in updated a lot) and we are trying to make the most of what is a poor site (soon to be moved to a combination of Joomla and Sharepoint). The website Manager also does a chunk of the paperwork for the team (and boy ... do some of the things in school generate paperwork ... we are back to those lovely laptops again).

 

The remote access setup was possible because of time dedicated to working out and planning what to do and how to make the most of it. We could only do this (the royal 'we') because we had the staff ... the same with the helpdesk ...

 

I think I explained it a bit badly ... If we only had 3 people we would not have had the helpdesk and remote access ... does that make more sense?

 

The laptops take up 1+3/4 technicians' time ... sometimes more, sometimes less (and yes ... we have done a Time & Motion on it to see if it was too expensive to continue) so that would be another way of dealing with things. We could drop our response times to issues ... that would be another way of dealing with it but we have a damn good response time to incedents ... we are only down on our long term targets mainly due to issues with suppliers or software.

[webman]

Ah okay that makes more sense now. I do understand that having more people allows for time to develop these sort of things whilst others maintain laptops, desktops etc... I suppose we're used to CC3 where we don't need as many staff; with remote access included by default I had time to developimpleent helpdesk, room booking etc, for example.

[GrumbleDook]

Yep .. and now we have these things in place we are looking at other things ... the big one next is the impact on Sharepoint in the school.

 

I will be filming and editting videos of science experiments later this week ... we have just rolled out a CPD logging database for our Training School side of things (by the placement student who has just gone actually ... Hi Ray), working on Vista deployment ready for putting it onto student laptops later in the year, preparing more documentation and user guides for staff and students for the various hardware / software we have round the school ...

 

Yep ... there are times when I think a pre-built solution would be good ... but we are in a position now not to need it that much and we enjoy the flexibility.

[Grommit]

Grommit, is your salary equivalent to a teaching post ie. Head of Dept?

 

roflmao........ I wish

[kestrel1]

Just a quick question. How many people are working in your departments i.e. NM, tech's etc. & how many machines are being looked after? I only ask, because I am the only one here looking after the whole schools network with about an 1100 user base, 130 thin clients (could be more by now), 8 servers, probably 60 or more PC's, most teaching staff with laptops + some support staff. More stuff coming in, more networking being added next year with about 60 more thin clients & 30 or more PC's.

I keep pushing for help, but nothing happens. Salary is real bad as well for a Network Manager.

[kestrel1]

Oh, forgot to mention. I am now losing the will to live, if you know what I mean. lol

[Butuz]

Thanks for the reply GrumbleDook - its food for thought! Dont envy you for the laptops though

 

Butuz

[torledo]

One person, working 20 hours a week, on the lodgeparkctc website? 8O

 

Err, that sounds reasonable ?

 

Sure it's a nice website but it's hardly msn.com is it..and it certainly doesn't look like a full time job to manage and update.

 

Plus they get her to do the asset register aswell!!!

Nice work if you can get

[AnnDroyd]

Looks fairly standard to me. Neat and organised, but no better than ours, which I maintain in my own time for no extra payment, just because I have pride in it.