How to do optimization. How to optimize the work of a department (universal algorithm). Choose your operating system wisely

In a company with more than one person, as a rule, there are various departments - sales, marketing, accounting, etc. The tasks solved by these services are very different, and the principles of their organization and functioning are also different. However, it is possible to describe a universal algorithm that can be used to optimize any department, regardless of its purpose and organizational structure. This is what we will do now.

What is optimization?

Operational optimization is a set of measures aimed at increasing the efficiency of a department (or an enterprise as a whole). The essence of these events can be expressed by the well-known motto - “Higher, further, better!” That is, as a result of the actions taken, the division begins to demonstrate increased productivity, reduced costs, etc.

So let's get started. Our task is to describe the universal stages of optimization of the unit’s activities.

An optimization request appears

A formal request for optimization can come from both the company’s management and the head of a department, looking for “what to fix here.” Accordingly, in the second case, the request is usually quite general, aimed at the general improvement of the system, and in the first, it is more specific, caused by dissatisfaction with the specific indicators of the department. For example, the head of a company may want to reduce the costs of a particular service. They say she consumes too much. This desire especially often arises in relation to divisions that do not directly affect the economic results of the company. An example is the personnel department, especially if its functions are limited to recruiting.

But the desire to cut costs is far from the only motive for change. Most often we are talking about the fact that the division in existing form does not cope with its responsibilities effectively enough.

The formulation of the request serves as a triggering element; this is where everything begins. And the first stage in this action is “Defining the mission and economic function of the unit”

Defining the mission and economic function of the unit

This point will probably cause the most surprise. It would seem, what is there to determine? The sales department sells, the courier service delivers, the advertising department advertises. And so on. However, everything is not so simple at all.

Let's start with the fact that in today's Russian business the conceptual apparatus is more or less established, but with job responsibilities within one position is still very far from unification. People occupying a position with the same title may do completely different things in different companies. The most telling example is marketers. The range of duties they may be charged with ranges from writing a business development concept to personal sales. It's the same with HR managers. For some it’s training, motivation, corporate culture, while for others it’s chronic hopeless recruiting. And such a spread can be found in most companies.

And that is why, before improving something, you need to determine what place this something occupies in the overall building of the company.

Accordingly, the answer to this question will include:

1. Description of specific tasks solved at the level of this unit

2. The place of the division in the overall activities of the company

3. Determination of economic participation in the general activities of the company

When answering these questions, you should try to maintain maximum clarity and specificity in the wording. Still, this is not done “for show,” so formulations like “To contribute in every possible way to the growth of the company’s welfare” are not appropriate here.

Definition of performance criteria

This point is key. Depending on what is chosen as an efficiency criterion, all further work will be based. As a rule, criteria are selected based on the tasks defined in the previous paragraph. That is, the analysis is based on the fulfillment of the “statutory goals” of the unit. For example, the task “preventing theft of company property” is defined for the security service - which means the number of thefts will be this very criterion for this task.

Thus, the previously formulated tasks give us the opportunity to assess the effectiveness of the unit’s actions.

If we are faced with the impossibility of assessment, it means that the tasks were formulated incorrectly, vague and meaningless formulations were made in the process, and we need to go back one point. There's a wash on the stake, start over.

But now - the criteria have been defined, and our next step will be “Assessing the effectiveness of the unit”

Unit performance assessment

Everything is clear here. We take the selected performance criteria and evaluate the situation according to each of them. Some things can be assessed numerically, some based on the “satisfactory/unsatisfactory” principle. As a result, we get a general report on the department, which clearly presents the situation for each of the tasks assigned to it. And, looking carefully at this report, we proceed to the next stage - “Setting optimization problems”

Setting optimization problems

Obviously, this stage is also not particularly difficult. It is necessary to optimize those points that “sagged” the most during the assessment. Optimization problems should be formulated in positive terms, i.e. indicate the desired result as the goal, and not the absence of the undesirable. Simply put, the goal of “reducing the average job duration to one and a half weeks” is the right goal.

And now, when all the tasks have been set, the fun begins. Namely - “Optimization measures”

Optimization measures

And, oddly enough, we begin these events with almost the same thing as half a page ago. That is, from analysis. But this is another analysis aimed at identifying internal reserves. And it begins with “Drawing up a general list of functions within the department”

Drawing up a general list of functions within the department

This list is closest to the detailed job description, with the difference being done for the entire department as a whole. But for simplicity, it should be broken down according to individual positions. Thus, we receive a detailed list of functions performed by employees of the department. And we move on.

Assessing the success of performing functions

Here, again, we are making an assessment. But not in general, as before, but for each of the functions. And we get a clear picture of exactly which functions are lame and how they are distributed among employees.

In the simplest case, it turns out that all the failures occur in one person and the correct decision is to replace this person. But this situation is the most incredible, since this saboteur would have been visible even without any research. Therefore, most likely, “sagging” functions will be evenly distributed among department employees.

If it becomes clear that it is impossible to assess the performance of functions, it is worth seriously thinking about the existing control system and whether it exists at all.

Determining the dependence of successful performance of functions on subjective factors

At this stage, we determine the extent to which performance problems are related to the personal characteristics of employees. For example, someone is very leisurely in life and has constant problems with deadlines for completing assigned tasks. Accordingly, the solution would be to change his responsibilities in favor of those that do not require quick reactions.

Determining dependence on factors within a department

The main internal factor influencing performance is the working atmosphere in the department. Moreover, both deviations from the middle - both positive and negative - lead to sad consequences. negative side. If there is an atmosphere of disunity, confrontation and aggression in the department, then the work will obviously stall in the part that requires interpersonal interaction. However, on the other hand, if the team is “warm”, then most of the working time can be spent in leisurely tea drinking and conversations “about life”.

Other negative internal factors are:

1. Insufficient automation of the process (for example, manually filling out documents, maintaining paper databases, etc.)

2. Duplication of employee functions

3. Unclear definition of job responsibilities

4. Availability of employees with dual subordination

Determining the dependence of successful performance of functions on factors outside the department

In addition to the above, it is necessary to track external factors. Often, the actions of related departments have a negative impact on the performance of a unit. For example, the slowness of the purchasing department may be due to the speed with which invoices are paid by the accounting department. It is clear that in this situation it does not make much sense to adjust anything in procurement.

Other examples - for failure to meet deadlines for recruiting an employee or preparing a marketing plan, it may not be the personnel and marketing departments that are responsible, but managers whose responsibilities included approving the submitted candidates and materials (some managers really like to “take a couple of weeks to think”).

“Tempographic mapping” - drawing up a map of the time spent on implementing the described functions (observation)

Let's dig further. Now we must arm ourselves with a pencil, a notebook and a stopwatch and settle in the department for several days. As a result of this sitting, we get a picture of the use of working time in the department - who spends how much and on what. Sometimes strange things come to light. For example, it may turn out that most of the working time employees go to the corridor to the shared network printer installed there and then look for their documents in other departments (where they were accidentally stolen from the general pile).

In any case, the data we receive is valuable. From them it immediately becomes clear where the years of our lives go.

Tempographic Mapping (survey)

Immediately after the observation event, we conduct a survey for a similar purpose. We invite employees to speak out about where they spend most of their time. We summarize the statements in a table, and compare the table with observation data.

Making suggestions for improvement (survey)

Another democratic event. We invite employees to speak on the topic “What bothers you in the work of the department and what can be improved?” The results will not necessarily amaze with the depth of the analysis (some people are only annoyed by the lack of soap in the toilet), but, in any case, it is worth listening to the opinion of “the people”.

Search for opportunities to consolidate similar functions

The analytical stage can be considered completed, and now we proceed directly to improvements. The first of these will be “Searching for opportunities to consolidate similar functions.” The point of this event is that similar functions that take up time from different employees are assigned to a separate employee. There are many examples of such solutions. This is an answering machine, or a secretary telling the way to the office, to which the subscriber is switched at the end of the conversation. This is also a PC operator, who in the accounting department is engaged in entering primary documents, relieving more qualified specialists of this routine. These are “telemarketers” - callers in sales departments, and researchers in recruitment agencies. And there are many other options.

Consolidation of functions makes it possible to save the time of expensive specialists and increase the overall productivity of the department.

Finding Automation Opportunities

Automation is the strong point of modern business. Indeed, in a typical organization's business process there are a lot of “nodes” that need to be converted to digital format. Accordingly, these nodes need to be identified and figured out how to put automation at the service of humans. The introduction of automation in a department can increase labor productivity by up to 100%, by freeing employees from routine work and reducing time for communication and searching for required documents.

When looking for automation opportunities, you should focus on the overall needs of the company. If the company plans to acquire unified system business process management, then perhaps the department’s problems will be solved by it. If you are not planning to implement a general CRM, it may be worth purchasing or creating some kind of standard department-level solution. And, in any case, there remains the possibility of automating individual functions using “home-written” programs, without aiming for “100% digital department management.”

Finding training opportunities

We put this point last, despite the fact that in many personnel departments “Training” is in the first line of priorities. However, learning to learn is different. And, since in our case learning is not an end in itself, but a means of improvement, we note the following points:

1. Optimization of work as a result of personnel training is not always possible, since there are a large number of factors not taken into account in advance. These include low employee motivation, different learning abilities among different employees, insufficient qualifications of the trainer, insufficient adaptation of the training course to the company’s requirements, etc.

2. People, unfortunately, are not very resistant material. Therefore, investments in training are justified only on the condition that the trained employee will work in the company for a sufficient period of time to “return” the funds invested in him. However, this is not always the case.

However, if the research has identified a need for training, then training should take place. The main condition that must be met in this case is tracking the effectiveness of training, how much the efficiency of the unit has actually changed.

Economic assessment of the prospects for optimization

So, after optimization options have been selected, we come to the most unpleasant moment. Namely, it is necessary to estimate the costs of carrying out these activities and compare them with the predicted economic effect. Why do we call this stage the most unpleasant? Yes, because it is here that the incomparable scale of costs and acquired benefits can become clear. In the sense that the costs are high, but the benefits are alas. But, nevertheless, it is precisely this stage that determines which transformations should be given a “start in life.” And, no matter how bitter it may be, it is worth ruthlessly refusing “improvements for the sake of improvements” - transformations that do not pay for themselves. Because in the long run, such “innovations” will only lead to disappointment.

And that's all, actually. Almost all. Because after implementing the selected solutions, it will be necessary to evaluate their effectiveness. But this is already a return to the very beginning of our story - “Assessing the effectiveness of a unit.”

Successful optimizations to you!

One of the trends of 2018 is the massive transition to mobile devices.

Indeed, many Internet users are switching to mobile gadgets (smartphones, tablets). People use mobile devices to search for information, make purchases, and read news. It is logical that very soon Google, and then Yandex, when ranking, will begin to give preference to sites that are maximally adapted for mobile devices.

First of all, SEO specialists should pay attention to Special attention creating mobile versions of websites. You need to take care of creating accelerated mobile pages. To solve this problem, it is very important to create a convenient interface for mobile device users. Great importance will have both the loading speed of the mobile page before navigation and this navigation itself.

Features of mobile optimization

When surfing via mobile devices, the convenience and ease of user interaction with the site comes to the fore. This is what determined the peculiarities of optimization for gadgets. Additionally, mobile search results are tied to the user's location, so mobile traffic, often this is regional traffic. In your work, you should also take into account the fact that the frequency of queries in mobile search differs from the frequency in regular search, and statistics on mobile search queries must be collected separately. Because of this, the semantic core of the mobile version of the site will be different.

Optimization methods for mobile devices

There are different approaches to optimizing a website for mobile devices.

mobile version— when logging in from a mobile device, the user is redirected to a subdomain. The following options are usually used as a subdomain name: m.sitename.com, mobile.sitename.com, pda.sitename.com, etc. The server determines the type of device and redirects to the desired page. For different types devices are used different variants code and different page URLs.

The advantages of this approach:

Minuses:

• use of additional URLs;
• Duplicate content and the possibility of a 404 error;
• restricting access to the necessary content due to simplification of functionality.

Moving the mobile version to a subdomain is suitable forFor online stores, catalogues, internet portals, social networks.

Dynamic display— for mobile devices, the site will be available at the same address, but when downloading documents, a template specially designed for mobile devices will be used. As in the previous case, the server will determine the type of device and, if the user is logged in from a tablet or phone, the document will be generated using the appropriate template.

Pros:

• unnecessary JavaScript can be removed from HTML;
• You can configure your own layout and applications for each device.

Minuses:

• development difficulties;
• the likelihood of an error when determining the types of mobile devices (if it is some rare phone, the desktop version of the site will be displayed on it).

Will dofor an information site, blog, forum, for online stores.

Adaptive design- when the URL and code do not change. The server provides all devices (both mobile and desktop) with the same HTML code, which adapts depending on the screen size using CSS. In this case, you need to make sure that the necessary CSS, JavaScript and image files are open for indexing.

Pros:

• fast implementation;
• ease of development;
• The site URL does not change.

Minuses:

• no alternative;
• scripts and styles that are not used in the mobile version will be loaded and will slow down loading.

Suitable forbusiness card site, information site, blog, one-page site, online store (with a simple structure, design and/or small assortment), service site or forum.

How to check site mobility?

You can check your website for ease of use for mobile users using the following tools:

• Page Speed ​​Insights- checks loading speed, and also gives recommendations on speeding up and optimizing the site for mobile devices.
• - an internal service of the Google search engine to check the ease of viewing websites on mobile gadgets.
• Checking mobile pages in Yandex.Webmaster - checks the site’s loyalty to mobile users.
• Fetch and Render in Google Search Console - with this tool you can see how the mobile version of your site is seen by the Google search engine robot.

How to properly optimize a website for mobile devices?

Put yourself in the shoes of a potential visitor and access your site from a mobile device. How fast do pages load? Will it be easy to find the information you need on the site?

Optimizing a website for mobile devices, first of all, means implementing simple and clear navigation that allows you to quickly find the content you need.

Let's look at a few characteristics of an effective mobile website:

Optimizing for mobile devices is both easier and more difficult than conventional website optimization. On the one hand, for mobile devices the site needs to be simplified, made as concise, easy, fast and accurate as possible. On the other hand, doing this while maintaining the necessary functionality is quite difficult. The site displayed to the user in the mobile search results should be simple, bright, concise, fast, but at the same time visual and provide the user with complete information.

However, by overcoming these difficulties and creating a website convenient for viewing from a phone or tablet, you can not only receive well-deserved mobile traffic, but also further monetize it, increasing the conversion of your mobile website, and, accordingly, the return on business as a whole. But read about this in one of our next articles.

If you want to keep up with the times, stay ahead of your competitors, or at least keep up with them, do not neglect optimizing your site for mobile devices. This is guaranteed additional traffic and sales conversions.

Many programs start automatically when you turn on your computer, causing your system to take longer to boot. In addition, these programs take up extra RAM and are not always needed by you.

To edit the list of programs for startup, you need to click the “Start” button and type the msconfig command in the search bar. In the Startup tab, programs that start when you turn on the computer are checked. All that remains is to uncheck unnecessary programs.

Be careful not to disable autoloading of utilities and antivirus products.

3. Disable autoloading of unnecessary fonts

When you turn on your computer, Windows downloads a selection of over 200 different fonts. You can disable unnecessary ones like this: “Start” - Control Panel - Design and Personalization - Fonts. Open the context menu with the right key and on the unnecessary font and select “Hide”.

Comic Sans only , only hardcore!

4. Deleting temporary files

In the process of work, many temporary files are created daily on the hard drive, which somehow imperceptibly become permanent. They also greatly reduce the overall speed of your computer.

Cleaning your computer regularly will help speed up boot times. operating system and programs, and also free up space on your hard drive.

To do this, just open My Computer - the partition with the operating system (usually Drive C:\) - the Windows folder - the Temp folder, and then delete all files and empty the Recycle Bin.

5. Disk Cleanup

To optimize Windows, Microsoft developers have provided a built-in disk cleanup utility. It searches for and deletes junk files, such as temporary Internet files, distributions of installed programs, various error reports, and others.

Go to the Start menu - All Programs - Accessories - System Tools - Disk Cleanup.

6. Disk defragmentation

By deleting unnecessary programs and files, start defragmenting the disk, i.e. regrouping files on your hard drive for maximum PC optimization.

Defragmentation can be done using Windows tools, or you can use special programs - this is a topic for a separate article.

The standard procedure will look like this - in Explorer, select the partition to defragment (for example, drive D:\) and right-click on it, in the menu that appears, open Properties and in the Tools tab, click “Defragment.”

7. Install SSD

A solid-state drive will help speed up the loading of the operating system and programs, self-installation which we reviewed in the laptop. If you don’t have enough money for a 500 GB SSD, it makes sense to purchase a disk at least to install the operating system - it will simply fly on the new SSD.

8. Install HDD


There are many video guides on HDD installation on YouTube. Here's one of them

If your budget does not allow you to spend money on expensive SSD drives, you should not give up more traditional components. Installing an additional HDD will significantly improve PC performance.

So, if the hard drive is more than 85% occupied, the computer will work many times slower. In addition, installing an additional hard drive on your desktop PC yourself is even easier than an SSD.

9. Installation of additional random access memory

RAM is used to process running programs. The more information you need to process, the more RAM you will need.

If there is not enough memory, the system begins to use hard disk resources, which leads to a critical slowdown of the computer and freezing of Windows.

Adding or replacing RAM sticks is not difficult. For a regular computer with a set of standard office programs, 4 GB of RAM is enough, and for a gaming PC you can think about 16 GB or higher.

10. Cleaning

Dust is computer enemy No. 2 (everyone knows that enemy No. 1 is). It prevents normal ventilation, which can cause PC components to overheat, slowing down the system. Extreme overheating of components can lead to their complete failure.

Turn off your computer at least half an hour before you start cleaning. Do not clean in synthetic clothing - friction may result in a static charge that can damage components. To remove static, touch the unpainted part of the central heating radiator.

Turn on the vacuum cleaner at low power and carefully remove dust from all parts of the PC. Particular attention should be paid to the power supply, processor cooler and video card, where most of the dust accumulates.

This article provides recommendations on how to optimize your website yourself. If you do not want to spend money on website promotion specialists and decide to optimize the website yourself, you may be able to do everything on your own, relying on advice.

Why is website optimization needed?

If you are familiar with the basics, feel free to move on to the next part of the article. This section is written for beginners who do not know how to optimize a website themselves.

When deciding which site to rank first, which one to rank second, and so on, search engines take into account two factors: external and internal. External ones are related to the number and your project from other sites, internal ones are related to the content of the web resource.

The task of website optimization is to maximize the attractiveness of the website content for search engines. How to optimize a site for Yandex or Google is not important, since all search engines work on similar principles. There are differences, of course, but they manifest themselves in the details.

How to optimize a website yourself: tips for beginners

To complete this task:

• The texts posted on the site are optimized for search engine queries: in other words, they include in the text keywords and phrases that are used to promote the site in the search engines Yandex, Google and others. There are no uniform rules on how to optimize a website. General recommendations: Main keywords should be included in the title and subtitles of the text, and also contained in the body with an approximate density of 3-5%.
• Optimize website design, taking into account the work of search engines. For example, Yandex and Google cannot read texts posted in the form of pictures. Therefore, if you need search engines to see your text, under no circumstances should you format it in the form of pictures or flash graphics. How to optimize a website from a design point of view? Try to ensure that each page has the opportunity to place large amounts of text, the menu is written with text rather than pictures, and each picture has an alt tag with keywords or phrases.
• They optimize the site structure and the names of sections, which should contain keywords and phrases for which the site is promoted in search engines. It is important that you can get to any page of the site from the main page by making a maximum of three mouse clicks. Otherwise, search engine robots may not reach pages located deep in the site, or very rarely index them. How to optimize a website if it has a large number of sections and subsections? In this case, it makes sense to create a site map that will contain links to the main pages of the project. It is advisable to place a link to the site map on the main page.
• If your site has a large number of pages, for example, hundreds of thousands, it makes sense to see if all the pages are in the search engine database? If not everything, then it makes sense to move some of the content to subdomains. The fact is that for each site, search engines set their own limit on the number of pages that will be included in the database of the same Yandex or Google. How to optimize a large website? If the site contains a large number of pages, some pages may simply not be indexed - by placing them on a subdomain, you can increase the number of indexed documents on the site.

We optimize the site ourselves in three stages

If you decide to optimize the site yourself, follow three steps in sequence.

1. Definition of keywords and phrases. At this stage, it is compiled by which you plan to promote the web resource in search engines. This is one of the most important stages of work, because if you select the queries incorrectly, all subsequent efforts to optimize and promote sites will be in vain!

Case study:

The client transports animals – the service is called pet taxi. Along with promotion for the word pet taxi, requests to promote the site for the request “transportation of animals.” An analysis of this request through the Yandex.Direct service shows that the majority of people, when asking the request “transportation of animals,” are not looking for pet taxi services at all, but for rules for transporting cats or dogs! By promoting the site for this request, the client will not receive a single client, although he will invest decent funds in promotion!

Sometimes it doesn't make sense to rank for one-word queries because most potential customers enter queries that contain two, three, or more words. Promotion based on a single word keyword will not have the same effect as promotion based on longer queries.

You can identify key queries by analyzing your own website and business and receiving query statistics from the Yandex.Direct service. As a rule, at the end you have a list of 10-15 requests, and sometimes more than 100 requests. It all depends on the theme of the site that you plan to optimize yourself.

2. Distribution key phrases by sections of the site. There is no point in promoting only the main page of the site or sections of the product catalog - in an ideal situation, every page on the site should be promoted. To ensure that documents do not compete with each other in search results, they must be optimized for different queries. It makes sense to optimize the main page of the site for the most popular queries, and the internal pages of the site for less popular queries. General rule: the higher the level of page nesting, the less competitive queries it makes sense to choose to optimize the document.
3. Optimization of each website page for selected queries:
   • Check the text for uniqueness. If similar text is on another site, rewrite it again before optimizing it.
   • Include in the text on your site all the keywords and phrases selected for this page.
   • Main keywords and phrases should occur at a density of 3-5%, and must also be present in the title and subheadings.
   • Make it a rule to make one subheading for every 1200-1500 characters of text. In a text of 2000 characters, it is advisable to have 1-2 subheadings, 3500-4000 characters - 3-4 subheadings, and so on.
   • If you decide: we will optimize the site yourself, get ready for tedious and painstaking work with the text. All keywords and phrases must appear exactly in the case in which they appear in your chosen keywords and queries. It is important that words and phrases are included exactly in the text, without changing the sequence of words. If you need to optimize the text for the request “buy furniture Moscow,” then this is exactly how this phrase should appear in the text.
   • Make sure that your text does not turn into a jumble of keywords - maybe search engines will like it, but people will not read such text, which means the commercial value of this text will be zero.
   • Write large texts - at least 3000-4500 characters. Be prepared for the fact that preparing content will take a lot of time and effort.
   • Provide in the text the possibility of highlighting key words or phrases in italics or bold - without fanaticism, but if you highlight several phrases in bold during layout, this will definitely not be superfluous.

We optimize the site ourselves: is it really profitable to optimize the site yourself?

This section is not intended for specialists in website promotion and promotion, but rather for clients who doubt the need to spend money on website optimization. Yes, you can do all the website optimization work yourself, but to do this you will have to learn a new profession and then constantly monitor changes in search engines and all trends in the industry.

You can save money and say: we will optimize the site ourselves, but in most cases this will mean that you will most likely spend all the subsequent ones, which significantly exceed the costs of optimization. Is such savings necessary? Everyone answers this question themselves.