Oracle Staffing Ratios

Is this only for production support or development/debugging and production support.

Production, development, and debugging.

An interesting and difficult question, and without being flippant -- what's your risk tolerance for three, or even two, BAs not being able to keep up with the workload.  Are your people creating, or mostly maintaining, heavily customized applications?  How frequently are you cycling product updates?  Are you covering 24x7 1st-tier support?

If you cut to three, and one then goes out for vacation, or perhaps disability leave, can the remaining two cover all functions?

I agree with dvz...

Just want to quote something here...

To manage anything, you have to measure it first..!!!

What you can't measure, you can't manage...!!!

---4 Oracle business analysts supporting 200 Oracle users.??

What are these guys doing??

Measure the tasks being performed by these guys, basis on which you can take decision accordingly..

Its really hard for any one to quote simply one resource/task or one resource/db unless you really measure ..

again there are certain parameters of measurement..

you have to consider the workload of current and forecasted workload, current projects and upcoming projects(in pipeline).,

Just benchmarking.  Simple question, with simple answers.

I'm not asking for opinions on staffing levels but hard data.  For example, "We have 5 BA supporting 500 users".

Don't make the question more complex than it is.

Please clarify your BA scope of responsibilities.  My project team numbers over 400 and we don't use that job title.

The question is like

"I have to dig a hole for which I have three people and 200 customers of that hole"  I need more information for example

1.  How big is that hole?
2.  What is the product for customers?
3.  How deep is that hole?

and so forth!!  For some jobs 3 are more than enough for others 3 will be too few.  i.e.

if you have to quench the daily thirst of 200 customers for next 5 years by the water of that Well (hole) you can say  it will take 1 person to dig for 1000 hours to get to water., second will mean 500 hours and third could be 333.7 hours a fourth person will make it 300 hours and a fifth person will make it 290 hour and six will make 290 hours and seven will make 290 hours and so forth.   As you can see any job will have point of diminishing returns.

so!! It is very hard to answer the question without knowing the scope of the application and daily usage of it.  And putting one person to dig a well as oppose to five depends upon the end deliverable.

Again, I'm not asking anything about how you would dig my hole.

I'm asking you, how many people are you using to support how many users.  Period.

Since you aren't offering any (ANY) helpful information about your environment, kindly stop commenting.

Author, The question may seem simpler to you as you had expected simpler answers based on some scenarios which you had already presumed...

The experts comments which have been posted over here are views which you may not have thought about..!!!

we are not here to make your question complex or to confuse you ..

We are providing relevant information.. and I have not seen any comment which is irrelevant to the topic which you had posted..

---"We have 5 BA supporting 500 users".

As already suggested...

The simplest answer is measure them...!!!

Ok.. To further give clarity on your question..I don't know whether this is a perfect staffing strategy,.. but the organisations which i had worked and currently working in i had experienced these scenarios..

8 Databases(develpmnt+test)..100 End users(3 persons, one dba cum system administrator, one network administrator cum dba and one developer)

Other Scenario : 7 databases(productions),4(Test Databases),7 Pre-Production Databases..

We have a team of 14 dba's working 24*7, 28 application developers working 9*5 and support analysts team of 12 working 18*7 and 1 architect, 2 business analysts..

again how this has been judged is on basis of measurement which I am sure that any organistaion would surely consider without comprising on service quality..

Thanks to those who provided the numeric data requested.