Finally, users get a prompt response to their questions and problems. The first thing to do is to hire the right people. In our university environment, we are often pressured to hire students. However, our experience has generally shown that even though one can hire several students for the same money as one highly experienced computer professional, the professional will produce more useful work than all the students combined. A person that is less than 25 years old just doesn't compare with a person that has more than 25 years of experience.
Quality outweighs quantity.
Certainly, another way to maximize the useful work produced by a system manager is to make everything, hardware and software, as homogeneous as possible. Several more instances of identical workstations require much less extra work to maintain, than several, even similar workstations that each need to be individually custom-tailored. Reducing the number of degrees of freedom, or the number of variables to deal with, reduces the overall work load. The secret is in choosing exactly which degrees of freedom to eliminate so that the load on the system manager is lightened, without seriously inconveniencing the users. The choice of which variables to eliminate is made by determining which ones are the most burdensome to administer and least useful to the user.