System Admin's Unit of Production?

RailGunSally writes "I am a (strictly technical) member of a large *nix systems admin team at a Fortune 150. Our new IT Management Overlord is a hardcore bean-counter from hell. We in the trenches have been tasked with providing 'metrics' on absolutely everything from system utilization to paper clip recycling. Of course, measuring productivity is right up there at the top of the list. We're stumped as to a definition of the basic unit of productivity for a *nix admin. There is a school of thought in our group that holds that if the PHBs are simple enough to want to operate purely from pie charts and spreadsheets, then we should just graph some output from /dev/random and have done with it. I personally love the idea, but I feel the need for due diligence, so I put the question to the Slashdot community: How does one reasonably quantify admin productivity?"

Number of Cases

of Jolt Cola consumed.

Measuring productivity?

How many tickets answered per day? Completed per day? /dev/random is probably the most elegant though

Re:Measuring productivity?

Trouble tickets are great, but I would recommend that you find ways to quantify all of the following in some way or the other -

1. Stability calculated using the uptime of your systems. You could include such things as updates, patches etc to this to demonstrate that stability is not set in stone.
2. Reliability is similar to stability, but how many production/pilot/training and other systems rely on you? How often and how well do you serve them?
3. Response time is how fast you react to problems and how often do problems come up? (trouble tickets are a good way to quantify the latter)
4. Network load is a good way to demonstrate how well your network is performing, if you are a *nix sysadmin handling networks.
5. Security is how much time and effort do you spend on keeping your systems secure, both internally and externally?
6. Efficiency would be a combination of all of the above and a way of measuring how well you achieved those things and how much time, resources and effort was expended to achieve those things.
   
   
   I am sure that others could find much better ways of quantifying performance, but this is something that jumped out at me. I was part of a consulting team that was asked to improve performance in a company several years back, and they came up with something similar.

The hammer priciple.

I remember an old joke about a furnace repairman coming to a home and after looking at the furnace for about a minute and a half, listening to the rumbles and gurgles. He takes his hammer out and at once precise place he hits the furnace. The furnace starts up and runs fine as if it was brand new.

The bill was $200.

The homeowner asks why so much when all he did was hit it once with a hammer?

The repairman takes back the bill, and itemizes the bill still totaling $200.

                      Cost of hammering, $1
                      Knowing where to Hammer $199

Any idiot can muck about on a UNIX box, I worked at one Fortune 500 company where everybody in the dept had Double E's. Still their main Solaris server crashed ever 3-5 hours daily and had been for months.

Took me a week to unscrew it and put everything back in order.

Me, I am high school dropout with no GED and some non-technical college courses. Still most of what I was doing was letting them do their work and not have to bother about broken systems. My value was on par with theirs as it was time they didn't lose on their work.

Nevertheless beancounters are stupid (also Beancounters are not accountants), they know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. If you really want to send their head swirling take the entire labor budget for each dept expressed as an hourly unit. Every time you work for a dept internally charge the company that much for each hour you work on a project or ticket for them or better still your company and tell them thats how much it costs. Without Sysadmins nobody does anything but fight technical fires and gets no work done.

Likely this joker found out that Auto Mechanics have a book to calculate how much to charge for each service and repair with details on how long each job should take. This doesn't work because Sysadmins are closer to being chefs or doctors then low end auto mechanics.

Even so, people who own Jaguars, Ferrari, and Maserati don't take them to Jiffy Lube.

If they complain tell them the story about about that hammer. (or better yet use on on them)

Re:The hammer priciple.

To approach it from an entirely different angle, much of an system administrator's job(whether Unix or not) is to avoid things, much like a security guard.

Just for one example: How do you measure avoided data leaks that would of cost millions?

Re:The hammer priciple.

Of course the elephant repellent is working! You don't see any elephants around here, do you?

Seriously though, that's a problem in many fields. People don't appreciate the value of a good military until they're under attack. They don't appreciate the value of a well funded police department until the crime rate starts increasing exponentially. And they don't appreciate the value of a good fire department until their whole block has gone up in flames. Sysadmins are no different.

Re:The hammer priciple.

My boss is happy with my work so far. Why is he happy? He tells me straight up: "Because I don't hear anything bad."

If the sys admin wasn't doing the job well, neither would anyone else.

Re:The hammer priciple.

I worked at one Fortune 500 company where everybody in the dept had Double E's.

Excellent. Tell me, how is Mr Hefner?

Re:The hammer priciple.

I knew a guy who was a millright for GM at Hydromatic, he was paid $45.00 an hour and played Euchre all day, management was fine with this because when he went to work, the plant lost $45,000.00 an hour. When a sysadmin is working, really working at his/her real job, the shit done hit the fan.

The sysadmin's job ...

... in my opinion, is to be as bored as possible. Everything which is done on a regular basis should be as automated as possible, and as much effort and resources thrown at avoiding potential problems as the finances and customers will allow (data backups, spare or redundant equipment, etc.).

Much of a "good" sysadmin's time should be spent doing regular, but occasional spot checks on the automation (which can also be greatly automated) to ensure everything is running as smoothly as possible.

Obviously, not all problems can be avoided, especially hardware failures, but if everything else is in place, even recovering a dead, but critical server can be fairly painless.

Re:The sysadmin's job ...

I have never been a SysAdmin but I have done IMR. In IMR if you are really doing your job, then no one knows your there but the bean counters, unless of course someone wants to add something new to the mix or operator error. Of course it was more obvious when you regularly had to change the machine setups to run different products. Pretty much everywhere I did that there was a ticket system to make the bean counters happy and the better you did your job the more creative you had to be to account for your time. If you didn't make the bean counters happy they would start working to get your job eliminated and if you worked directly for production in this respect the departmental manager might try making you do production work when not doing maintenance or repairs.

Fortunately the at the place I worked the longest in that field the plant manager was a former IMR technician and he would give a dressing down to any bean counter or ignorant lower management who messed with us, as he put it "this plant is running very smoothly because of this IMR crew and they all know that the smoother things are running the more time they have to relax and plan future required interventions to keep themselves relaxed with free time to think." Course we were not always thinking of such things while relaxing and he knew that, but he knew as long as we got rewarded with relaxing time at work, the smoother we would keep things running to preserve the relaxed atmosphere.

Personally, I think the SysAdmin who contributed the question here should check the obviously clueless "new IT Management Overlord"'s computer to make sure they not violating copyright via downloading recordings; make sure they are no trojan infesting the system; and make sure they are not downloading large amounts of porn, it would be a shame if this "bean counter" had to account for anything like that.

Re:The sysadmin's job ...

Hmm, thats true lets see now.

clickityclickityclickityclickityclickityclickitycl ickityclickityclickityclickity

su username

clickityclickityclickityclickityclickityclickitycl ickityclickity

not there.... hmmm

clickityclickityclickityclickityclickityclickitycl ickityclickityclickityclickityclickityclickityclic kityclickityclickityclickityclickityclickityclicki tyclickityclickityclickity

launch gimp, batch job import, crop

clickityclickityclickityclickityclickityclickitycl ickityclickity

copy rename alter datestamp chown

clickityclickityclickityclickityclickityclickitycl ickityclickityclickityclickityclickityclickityclic kityclickityclickityclickityclickityclickityclicki tyclickityclickityclickity

hmmm ok found it tsk tsk tsk, and he seems like such a nice young man. .......

Cows???? oh good lord

clickityclickityclickityclickityclickityclickitycl ickityclickityclickityclickity

mail "my vacation photos" all

/ tip of the hat to the BOFH

Re:The hammer priciple.

"God, slashdot is full of you guys and frankly I think you're all full of shit. No offense to you personally, I just hate seeing people kicking on college degrees like they don't mean anything."

Ditto, only financial success or inexperience permits the arrogance of thinking EE == Computer Science == Software developer == SysAdmin == Help Desk slave. It's total bullshit to infer dropping out of HS won't make a "difference" and that financially it is a detrimental step for all but a tiny minority of naturally gifted (or extremely lucky) entrepenuers and assorted geniuses.

Me, I'm a high school dropout who then went on to be a member of the "working poor" and/or "time poor" until I obtained a degree in my early 30's. I quit the factory, got a lisence and invested $1K in a brand new Acer XT with a "paper white" 16 colour CGA monitor to replace my $80 second-hand IIE at the start of my course. It was not a small investment for us, but freeing up the family TV was a diplomatic coup over the wife/kids and it was also the best finacial one I ever made.

My last year at uni the computer directly earned me $9K writing small "search and sort" examples for a text book the dept. head was writing. Indirectly, I am now quite comfortable in my late 40's and have a decent chance of being very comfortable in my 60's. Barring a lotto win, my alternate future would probably have seen me as a factory foreman (I was already a leading hand -death by rotating shiftwork- shudderrr). And when the factory job "disappeared", as so many did in the last couple of decades, I would probably have spent my severence pay on a franchise gardener/handyman/taxi-truck "bussiness", OTOH: I would probably be 10-15Kg lighter and have an endless supply of home grown pot... :)

Today I live by the beach with a 15min drive (or a broadband connection) to the office, I like to take pictures of storms on the bay but the trick is finding a profitable passion to pay for the time and material needed for your other passions (that may also one day be profitable). Sure doing a degree and finding out just how smart others before you have been can dull the "passion" as one by one you find your "original insights" are not original and/or not instghtfull. For me it didn't completely kill the passion but it did open up the enormity of what I don't know and how hard it can be to "find out". If the "passion" were to die completely I have made enough profit to walk away and do something else besides mowing lawns for the middle class simply because a little passion for one's job and a decent "fuck-you" fund equates to power when dealing with PHB's.

If someone doesn't think a degree will help with any of that then to them it isn't going to. They are either already "happy" or belive like I once did that the only reason for "working" is a paypack.

Re:The hammer priciple.

Please correct me where I have misread, but in all your verbosity you seem to have made two statements:

- One cannot quantify the sysadmin job

- You're better at it than some

To my (non-MBA) eyes, these two appear in contradiction. If one cannot measure/quantify how well a sysadmin is doing his/her job, then one cannot claim that one is doing a better job than the other. Thus one might as well hire the cheapest guy. If, on the other hand it is supposed to be possible to say "you're doing a better job than joe" then there must be something measurable, observable, something that can be put into a number and that number differs for you and joe (in such a way as to make yours the better number).

I admit I have no idea how to measure the quality of a sysadmin. If my stakeholders forced me to (I.e. my boss said "quantify what your IT dudes are doing") I would go to my sysadmins and say "please give me numbers that show how well you're doing". Because the alternative is pulling something out off my ass -- and neither my superiors nor the people who work for me would like that.

Re:Measuring productivity?

That's a good list. I'd add a little more, though.

Personally, I split sysadmin work up into two categories: doing something and making it so you don't have to do anything. The second is much more important, but much harder to quantify.

For the first category, you can definitely count things for managers. E.g., X accounts created, Y support requests handled. Be very careful quantifying things like this, though, or you create perverse incentives. If I make a system that's hard to use, I can receive and satisfy a lot of support requests. Or if I concentrate power rather than distributing it, then I get to look busy and important.

The other category is much trickier. Long ago I worked for a financial trading company. About 80% of the working day, the head clerk would just loiter on the trading floor, reading the paper and shooting the shit with clerks and traders. And that was exactly what his bosses wanted: they correctly saw that as a sign he kept things running smoothly. And then when problems popped up, he could give them his full attention while the rest of the operation kept running.

So I'd add two items to your list: user satisfaction, measured through surveys, and crisis preparedness, measured by speed and quality of response during drills (and actual crises, of course, but you can't wait for those to find out how ready you are).

From a SA Who Became a Bean Counter

I am an SA who became a bean counter. One of my primary motivations was that I saw f*ck-ups getting rewarded with less work and raises while hard-working SAs suffered with more work and dead end jobs.

I think management deserves to know what is good work and what isn't. If you leave it up to them, they are going to pick something like tickets resolved or customer satisfaction and you are going to see the a**-kissers move up while the hard-working straight-shooters get the shaft.

I think the metrics described here are good ones, but I'd change #4 to the ratio of load to capacity -- which is a measure of efficiency and good planning. Overall, a good SA should be able to maximize delivery of services. I'd also change #5 to security risk measured as ELV (expected loss value). I know a lot of security professionals who hate this and think it is meaningless, but so far none has given me any better metric to show management that security risks are actually getting better managed over time.

In short, think of what a good SA does for a company and propose metrics that reflect that. Do NOT leave it up to management like some have suggested. THey are asking for your opinion as an expert. Step up and show that you are the expert by giving them an expert answer. Show them that you know the difference between a good job and a bad job.

Re:Measuring productivity?

No. How many tickets were not opened in the first place because things
just work.

Yeah, I know.

Re:Measuring productivity?

Hours of productivity per day lost to productivity measuring?

Productivity is a dirty word.

Simple answer is that you don't. Productivity in terms of IT and related fields has become a dirty little word but more than that it is a business term, not technical. If you aren't a director or higher in title, and your duties don't include justifying expenses and planning resources for solutions, then it isn't really your realm to measure something like productivity. If this guy has an MBA or similar qualifications, it is he who should know how to measure productivity. But alas the word productivity has become corrupted by half-assed business journalists trying to write articles about over all productivity and how your employees waste too much time on facebook. If this guy just wants a number and gives you no guidelines as to how to come up with the number, then my guess is that he just wants to kiss up to the CEO that "productivity" is up 40% or he wants a number to justify laying off people. Either way, if he cant tell you how he reached his number, I would suggest getting your resume ready.

Also ideally, a CTO wouldn't be asking those in the trenches how to measure productivity, but rather how to improve it. As someone in the trenches, you probably know where the snags are in efficiency, or what software you would need to purchase to help smooth things along or even where people are over worked or over looked. This is the positive way to improve productivity. Basically he should be asking you what you need in order to get your job done, and he should get it for you (within reason of course)

Unit of production

The best sys admins are the ones you never notice. If the productive workers in a company never see or need to talk to a sys admin it's been a productive day for the admins.

Re:Unit of production

The best sys admins are the ones you never notice.

If the productive workers in a company never see or need to talk to a sys admin it's been a productive day for the admins.

Bingo. So here's what you do:

Leave for a week.

When you get back, after you've managed to suppress the fires and riots, fight your way to Mr. Bean's office, talk him down off of his desk, get him to put away the spear, and tell him "that's why you keep us around." If he wants it quantified, write it up as "Number of Cannibal Insurrections Suppressed Per Week (Estimated)."

Re:Unit of production

To be fair, I doubt the beancounter is arguing that there are too many of them, or that they don't do anything. Most managers tend to fight to increase the size of their department: more underlings = more influence. By having metrics that can be charted and shown to more senior management, the beancounter is likely to wind up doing some good for the department.

Re:Unit of production

Not necessarily. He could spend money that should be spent on training or equipment on a new employee.

Well...

"How does one reasonably quantify admin productivity?""

If no one in the building but HR and your line report need to know your name, you're doing your job...

Other than that, it would be like a trash collector counting how many cans he emptied during the day or a wildfire firefighter how many burning bushes he chopped. If there weren't any fires or trash these people wouldn't be needed, would they?

You can't quantify SA productivity.

Re:they dont chop burning bushes

The problem is the numbers don't look good. To quantify what you're looking for you'd want "number of hours spent idle" i.e if a sysadmin did his job well and has everything running smoothly, how many hours does he have with nothing needing to be done?

Once any manager or other authority type sees that number though rather than seeing you did a good job at keeping things reliable, they'll see you as lazy and assign work you shouldn't be doing (other peoples jobs).

Really just about anything other than data entry is hard to quantify in the computer field. Someone suggested troubletickets.. but theres a huge difference between a ticket that requires you to restart apache, and one that requires you to strace half your system to debug, and raw ticket numbers don't tell you that.

On the same note, lines of code mean nothing to actual programming, nor do "functions per day" or anything similar as again, you can't quantify the effort required in an easy line vs hard line. Is it a simple debug print or core logic you had to scratch out on a whiteboard to keep sane?

Re:Well...

You can't quantify SA productivity.

I respectfully disagree.

You can evaluate how many users the SA's systems serve, how many systems the SA maintains, and how much data throughput all these users/systems generate.

A confused Microsoft-SA running in circles around an Exchange server all day in order to serve 200 users is not "efficient" compared to a Linux-SA running an MTA which services 25.000 users (with better response times).

On the other hand, a non-skilled Linux-SA who is fiddling with a SAMBA server in order to maintain 200 users with Windows clients is not very "efficient" compared to a skilled Microsoft-SA with a well configured AD.

Off course you can measure SA efficiency. And there is nothing bad about it. In most cases it is even a benefit for the *nix admins.

:-)

- Jesper

Time to find another job

Since the real proof of actual productivity for network admins is negative: nothing goes wrong (no trouble tickets). Also, the PHB will get their wish: No one to pay is infinite productivity (measured as output per $ spent).

Unit of productivity

Unit of Productivity = 1 / (hours of down time)

They are paying you to keep bad things from happening.

Units

How does one reasonably quantify admin productivity?

In admons.

That is arse backwards

You aren't building automobiles or painting teapots. You are a support function and not a line function.

You should have business plan objectives. These things are usually annual; there can be longer strategic objectives. If the person who set these things did it right, they should be measurable.

What I'm trying to say is, if you're banging your head against the wall trying to figure out how your performance should be measured, your higher up didn't set your objectives correctly.

This doesn't apply anywhere and everywhere. When the organization is in the business of IT itself, you might be measured differently since you'd then be contributing directly to the organization's core business. But from the description provided, it sounds like you're not.

Re:That is arse backwards

You aren't building automobiles or painting teapots. You are a support function and not a line function.

That is the best answer I've seen so far in this discussion. It mostly clearly illustrates that the question is framed wrong.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to monitor and even quantify the value that an employee brings to the organization, but contrasting support function vs. line function perfectly illustrates the key point here: production is not the only kind of value that an employee can add to an organization.

I wonder if a way of communicating this might be to make an analogy to something a financial person can relate to. You can use money to make several different types of purchases: you can buy durable goods, you can buy consumables, and you can buy more abstract things like insurance or legal advice. Don't take the analogy too literally, but system administration is like insurance or legal advice in that the value you provide is stuff like protection, security, planning, design, and order.

I think if this were me, I would start by providing an outline of the responsibilities of the system administrator and the value that a system admin provides to the organization. This does include certain deliverables (like physical installation of hardware in machine rooms, installation of software, working and configured systems, documentation, answers to technical questions, training presentations, and code for scripts written to automate tasks), but it also includes a lot of work that doesn't have a deliverable (like diagnosing a problem and tracking down a patch from a vendor, or even convincing a vendor to supply a patch). It might be helpful to break the job down into types and subtypes of work being done and very rough estimates of the proportion of time being spent at each.

So maybe the best plan is to educate the higher-ups about what the job really entails. It's quite possible they don't understand much about it, and some increased visibility into what is really going on could help with their understanding and thus their comfort level with paying the salaries of the people who do it.

Also, there are deliverables that can be quantified. Creating user accounts, for example, has to be done repeatedly, and it takes about the same amount of time every time it happens. Auto mechanics deal with a similar situation and the industry has developed a list of tasks (such as replacing a fuel pump or brake pads) and standard times required to accomplish them. The computer world changes so quickly it might be hard to accomplish that, especially without industry support, but it seems possible to quantify some of what a system administrator does, because some of it is standard stuff.