And here is my reply... (not sure why my email doesn't have a reply-to
header but it seems to be happening a lot at the moment... I think it is a
mailman issue because the same is happening to everyone (for me anyay).
I'm not a involved in technology professionally, but I did handle most
of the tech work for WMUK's first fundraiser in
2009.
Great! I've been trying to find someone able to give me a good overview of
what exactly is needed (tech-wise) for the fundraiser to little effect. Any
chance you could fill me in on what was/is needed?
That was an
extremely simplistic and ineffective fundraiser,
and it still took me
significantly more than a day a week in tech work
(plus a significant
amount of Mike's time as well). Admittedly,
someone that didn't keep
having to stop to google CSS they had forgotten
could have done it a
little quicker, but it's still a lot of work
to implement and maintain
the kind of fundraising system we need. I can
pretty much guarantee
that WMUK lost money last year by not having a
streamlined system for
setting up direct debits, and that was because
they didn't have the
paid tech resource they needed.
I appreciate the fundraiser is something of a special case - although again
I can't bring my experience to bear on it because I don't have a full spec.
On the other hand we risk ending up with the same situation as this year;
no one working tech... so I'd prefer to see not-quite-enough tech support
instead.
Then consider office tech support, which is on your list. That's
something you can't really do remotely and
part-time. If something
goes wrong, you need to be there to fix it. With
a rapidly growing
office, that's going to take up a significant
amount of time as well.
(It's probably half a day's work just to
set up each new staff
member.)
True, some aspects are hard to handle remotely. But, again, this gives us a
tech resource to draw on and helps justify FTE in 2014.
Realistically speaking; if you're paying £35K for a developer/manager
(which is what the last job description was looking for) it's not a great
use of his or her time to be fixing laptops :) If this is a major issue
there are contract tech support services we could look into to fill this
specific gap that would be more cost effective.
Then there is supporting programmes. We've pretty
much just made do
without good tech for our programmes, but if you
had a tech person in
the office you can be sure that people would come
up with a lot of
programme related work for them.
So this just needs prioritising; not everything will get support - but
that, again, is another data point.
In addition, a lot of people think we should be paying
someone to do
some mediawiki development. Writing extensions
that we think are
important and that the WMF isn't supporting,
for instance. You could
easily fill a day a week with that.
This is a silly idea, as I said before, and we should forget about this for
a moment. Focus on our own tech needs.
Even if we hire a FTE getting them to do this in their schedule would be a
waste of money.
And finally there is all the work that you don't
realise exists
because you've never had anyone to do it but
inevitably discover as
soon as there is someone available to do it
("Work expands so as to
fill the time available for its completion."
[1]). That can include
very productive and valuable things.
I have considered everything I've been told so far about our own needs; and
added on top of it my own experience in working this way. So I am confident
one day per week is sufficient in the short term.
In fact, companies almost always overestimate the tech time they need. This
is because they see projects that might fill 4 days of work - and
extrapolate that the developer is going to be BUSY. The truth is you get
busy periods and lulls - and a good engineer will be able to manage time
effectively to spread this out (for example; fundraiser might need lots of
work, but if you start in May...).
I think you we hire a 0.2 FTE contractor, we'll
quickly find we are
going ridiculously over budget on overtime and
end up increasing the
standard hours. Once you do that, the arguments
in favour of a PT
contractor rather than a FT employee reduce.
What's the alternative? We can't find someone to do all the stuff we need
at the budget we have set. And a FTE is certainly too much for our next
years needs.
The best approach is to bring in a minimum utility and work up from there;
justifying a FTE for the 2014 budget will be MUCH easier if we can say
"look at X specific things we didn't have time to do".
Tom
(ps you replied Offlist - not sure if that was intentional but I kept it
off-list just in case :))