[SAGE] Costing out of sysadmin services

["Linda Drake" <Linda.Drake@Colorado.EDU>]

We're in the unenviable but now common position of finding ourselves
faced with diminishing budgets but not diminishing workload or projects.

I've struggled for some time to find a way to cost out our services so
that we can: (1) understand where our efforts go, as personnel is the
vast majority of our costs, and (2) present a convincing case for better
allocating existing resources or acquiring new funding. In summary, I
need to be able to answer the question: how much does service X cost to
provide?

The challenge for me has been that sysadmins work in parallel on a
multitude of big and small tasks. It's not a profession where you have a
few major projects that occupy your time, and every day you take a few
moments to jot down how much time you spent on each project. As a
sysadmin, not only are you juggling a variety of tasks simultaneously,
the tasks themselves span a whole variety of services. As an example, a
set of patches is installed on all the platforms as part of one task.
Determining how much time of that effort went toward the "email"
service, the "web" service, the "directory" service, the "helpdesk"
application, and dozens of others, seems to me unworkable and near
impossible.

Yet somehow I need to identify the costs of providing our services. I
know I can't be alone in facing this challenge and have faith that
greater minds have examined this and have an answer (the magic pixie
dust) or at least some pointers on how to start. Advice is welcome and
appreciated. If I get sufficient responses, I'll gladly post a summary.

-Linda

Linda Drake
Manager, Computing Systems
Information Technology Services
455 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0455
Linda.Drake@Colorado.edu
(303) 492-3864