CAD Manager/ IT

[alc]

Based on experience how large does a firm grow before it needs a person dedicated to IT, CAD, Hardware and general user issues?

[dgorsman]

If you have a server, you need dedicated IT - even if it's somebody on-call.
If you have server-based database systems e.g. SQLServer, you need dedicated IT and somebody with enough free time to manage the database system.

Generally, CAD and IT systems are changing so rapidly as to need specialists in both. Try becoming a master at both IT support and a product like Plant3D, Inventor, or Revit and at best you will be mediochre at both while not having enough time to handle all issues for either. In very small companies you can get away with having a few "power users" to manage the CAD side and general issues since they are familiar with design practices and terminology IT guys were *never* trained on. In the meantime the IT people will know about network wiring, software upgrades, restoring-from-tape-backup, and other things the designers wouldn't know where to start with.

[Paul Munford]

I think that it depends on the business owner. If they see a need for a specialist - they will hire one. If they don't they won't (even if they need one!).

[jaberwok]

I think that it depends on the business owner. If they see a need for a specialist - they will hire one. If they don't they won't (even if they need one!).

Education, then. Again.

[Wanderer]

Good commentary, but, to give some approximate numbers...

From the management courses I took in college, if a staff can be grouped by similar task, they'll have about 1 manager for 10 people (bump that up to 15-20 if the work is repetitive and low-skilled, reduce it to 5-8 staff if you're in a complex and skilled environment).

My Manager oversees a staff of eight (7 technical staff and 1 admin).

[Brian Myers]

Alc,

You've had several good answers, but I believe the big picture has been missed. Also, I believe we need to look at your question and better understand what you are asking. From a management standpoint what you are asking should have nothing to do with the number of individuals on staff, so we need to reformulate the metric by which hiring should take place.

We must consider these items:

1. Is our organization financially stable? Do we see a continued revenue stream in the "near" future?
If the answer is YES then we ask the next question:

2. Are we currently experiencing issues? This is a big question... if current practices (or outside consultants) are handling issues easily, then there will be no need to hire someone internally to be this dedicated resource. If the answer is yes, there are issues, then we move on to the next question:

3. How much money are we losing because of these issues? A dedicated individual is overhead, we need to justify the cost of this individual by increasing the profits due to this individuals efforts within the organization. If we decide that we are losing "X" number of hours of productivity from our staff and by hiring this individual we gain them back, then hiring makes sense, regardless of staffing numbers.

4. Will NOT having them on staff have a negative impact on our organization? This is also a big question. As an example, if this individual can negotiate deals with outside contractors to get hardware, software and services costs down, then the money they save for the organization (instead of increasing the productivity of others) could pay for itself. I could type for hours on this statement, but the point being is that this individual could have a positive impact beyond enabling staff to be more productive.

There are more items to consider, but I think those items hits a vital point. I've seen companies that could justify it with 10 people. I've also seen organizations that could justify it with 60 employees. The end has nothing to do with "meeting standards", fixing office equipment, training users or running a network. These may be tasks, but as management, can you give me the "elevator pitch" as to why these matter?

(Elevator Pitch is a sales "term". It means being able to effectively describe your goals, quickly, and communicate the value in a compelling way to the listener before the elevator doors open).

As management I care about many things... the client, our reputation, our people, etc... but I really care about keeping our doors open and increasing revenue. For this position to exist I need to be able to justify it financially.

So those are the questions you need to ask. It's less about staffing, more about revenues.

[GreyHippo]

I am the CADD Manager and IT Manager at a small business. I support 4-5 AutoCAD users and 30+ network users. I spend about 0-4 hours a week on CADD / IT support duties and the rest of the time is spent on client projects.

[09silverado]

There are too many variables to answer this straight, my experience says that a CAD Manager can deal with 3-5 people on a daily basis and do billable work. when you reach 10-20 users coming to you everyday it's approaching a full-time job because the compromises are being made everywhere and everything suffers.

Dedicated I.T. is reached at about 100.