General cleaning in the company

Last year was enchanting. Specifically - a complete ass, and that's just now, when we are well rattled off the season, I feel that you can breathe a little.

The fact is that we suddenly became a big company for ourselves with all the ensuing disadvantages. It used to be thought that fatness is part of the process, and you just need to relax and have fun. Nah At the same time they caught the tail of the crisis and rode well on it.
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Do you know what a big company is? This is when you do not know someone in the face. When there are people in the team who work according to their official duties without understanding what their work is for. When the simple task “print a sign with the text to the store” begins to walk according to the agreement and is solved in 22 days. Real case. This is when the contract is signed 4 months. And a bunch of other jokes animal grin bureaucracy.

Rake it all up ... hmm, well, let's say, fascinating.

Beginning of the year 2017: open Pandora's box

Now - just episodes. Systematically, as we were taxiing, I will write after some more time, when it will be understood that everything is more or less stable and there is some practical experience to share. For now - just a stream of consciousness with bright moments of the year.

Here is January, Dima Borisov slyly winked and called into the negotiation room. He said that there he laid the table. He took all the bills that need to be paid in order to continue to work normally - for example, how much money is needed for a product in order to optimally expand the range to a good level, what shops need (outdoor advertising and various engineering things), all sorts of office items that we put off because of the crisis. And they covered the table. Literally. Mostly overlap. A large table was completely covered with bills. You could walk around and look at them. And ohrenev quietly.

Money - after the New Year holidays - we had on the account. And if we pay bills, and the year turns out to be the same as 2016, it will be incredibly bad. The main question was whether the company is working effectively. Specifically: 1) What will be the sale, if we assume that we will solve all the issues with the initial financing? 2) Will the company be profitable in this case? 3) How to track the loss of money in the course of the year, given that 25% of revenue falls on the last month?

Two weeks of discussions, picking numbers and gathering with laptops and Excel showed that all is not well. From numbers and rational conclusions it followed that our company is ineffective. That is, we did something wrong, and for quite some time.

We looked at the office with a fresh look. A pair of familiar big guys told me what to look for. Here are 4 of our key symptoms for differential diagnosis:

1. The office staff left at 6 o'clock in the evening, you can check the clock - before many were left to finish things, because my eyes were burning garbage.
2. Disputes were resolved only through the head - that is, most often two employees could not agree at their level. This is not very correct, and there is even a whole book called “Collaboration” about it. This I later learned.
3. A regular answer to the question “Why?” - “I don’t know, they always did that.” In exact sciences, such an answer is unacceptable, and we sort of did business as an experimental process.
4. Instead of meaning, follow the instructions. Similar symptom. Yes, on the one hand, when a new person on day 3 of work says that it is necessary to try not so - perhaps we have already tried and written about it in the instructions. But when everything that knows the specialist does an obvious senseless garbage only to cover his ass in bureaucratic terms - well, this is not how we imagined the office of a dream. The brightest example for me is vacancies. We have always written vacancies very clear, with an illustration of the working day, with a clear guideline on the salary and what it consists of. A couple of times frames were missed by bureaucratic hell, a couple of times no one could say for sure how long the specialist would receive.

Please note that these are symptoms, that is, signs. Properties (syndrome) affected the financial aspect and the model.

And we started general cleaning. It turned out that the comparison with the cleaning is very much to the cashier. Until you decide and stop everything to get out - nothing will change.

This is more like company refactoring. At that moment, incredibly clumsy shoals crept out from under the surface, crutch solutions began to crumble, and everything burned. Because our ideas about the company and the reality are slightly different.

The beginning of 2018: what we have come to

Perhaps, the situation can be described most vividly with the words “technical debt”. In the crisis of 2016, we covered everything with crutches, and they accumulated a bit. Only crutches are not in technical terms, but in organizational terms. That is, such an organizational debt has accumulated.

Symptoms, again, are:

• There are carriers of unique knowledge. Speech about the fact that when someone goes on vacation, some processes can fall off, because no one knows how they are done. An example is the announcement of a free game store in a cafe. The process was based not on the department, but on agreements with its leader. We started to make a knowledge base (so far in the process, but the bottom level of documentation is already ready).
• The chains of approvals were extended - clear, simple interaction schemes were needed.
• The connection between the line staff — our front line — and decision makers was lost. That is, people do something, but they do not understand exactly why and why. There is no possibility to check the correctness of their actions outside the instructions
• There were a lot of old tasks that had to be solved.
• There were people who obviously could be replaced by a script.

To rake it all out, first of all you had to set a goal. And the goal automatically means control, that is, constant monitoring of whether we are going there.

There is the story of IBM with their elephant on the dance floor, there is the story of aluminum production with their “safety first”, there are many other stories. That is, you can use two approaches - either to give a very clear guideline in front, or to start splitting up a company into small and interacting ones, so that each has its own goal.

We divided the Mosigra into retail, distribution, online store, master franchise, production and publishing. Retail sells games in stores and maintains its IT accounting. Distribution ensures the availability of goods and sells them in bulk. Online store is a call center and delivery. A master franchise is an interaction with franchise partners and an analogue of the “disassemble” folder on your desktop, foreign expansion. The whole core core team is also grouped there, because we are not only engaged in the desktops. Production collects games from atoms, the publishing house is responsible for intellectual property.

The division process took almost half a year and was accompanied by stormy discussions, where is whose piece. Understandably, we lost a lot of things at the junction of companies, but we acquired much more. The companies themselves have changed a little bit: for example, there was already a case when production did not make its direct order, but boxes for equipment (because we are one of the best cover-bottom boxes in the country thanks to the Frankenstein line), but the corporate department in distribution ordered the production of the game is not on our capacity. Competition!

It was very important to separate cash flows. If earlier the question was “what is more important - equipment or utility payments in the store”, now each company in the group has its own budget. That is encapsulation. Feeling as if from one long such piece of linear code jumped to the PLO. Yes, there are data sharing costs, but the benefits are clear.

Here's another episode. At lawyers circus was going on. Andrei Sitarsky decided to sort everything out there and began to establish such an approval process so that the documents passed faster - two weeks instead of two months became a normal term. There was a "red corridor" for urgent documents. We made a couple of times with a foreign legal entity for 2 weeks, which previously would have been a quest for six months.

At the same time, a wave of fake board games surged on the market. You will laugh, but the desktops also fake. The problem is that all sorts of "Kurkodil", "Uando", "Shakgaly" and "Manchiken" made so disgustingly bad that they turn people away from further purchases. Andrew began to sue those who sell it. Previously, we were suing those who produce for the use of registered trademarks.

Development and production cracked at the seams. At the beginning of the year we shared production facilities with a publishing house (intellectual property with a build line) —Tikhon, the former head, went to build a garment factory from scratch (as a result, he now builds a football club), and Kostya (the one who invented the miracle glue from post about the monster Frankshsheyn) began to restore order. Also a lot of details surfaced.

Development - just started refactoring everything and everyone. This is a topic for a separate story that I told on the Joker. In short, the phrase “And now I have to check every item of the checklist?” Drove into a stupor.

Two stores opened under our banner without our permission. They, along with “Mozgigra”, had to be closed through the court, but, thanks to Andrei’s inhuman sense of humor, we did it quickly and very magically. From the owners' attempts to wipe traces on the network at the last moment was ridiculous.

Appeared phishing mirror site - a complete copy. Fortunately, they decided in two days, the hoster responded very quickly to the court decision. Then the story repeated.

I, too, cool kosyachil. We have always had a culture of what if you see something that can be improved - go and do it. And then a conflict was born between my experience and knowledge of how things work, and new people. They wanted to try something that I already passed about 8 years ago. And I was cutting the initiative to them, and quite hard. And it was right to give a step on this rake, because even if in 20% of cases my assessments are outdated, this is very profitable. This was a lot of where in the departments. There was a feeling that we are always missing some opportunities and are late.

At one of the conferences, the uncle-director Danny Perekalski from Ozon said that he had done everything so that his own employees could be bought from his company again, ordered to his office. Before that, they bought in other places. According to the results, it became clear where they are not working - what is not, what is expensive, why the delivery is too slow and so on. We listened with clever faces, came to the office and arranged a nix. Specifically:

• The online store began to report every day on cancellations and reasons.
• All orders "canceled due to lack of goods" came to the purchasers, and they personally reported to the general about why there is no such product.
• Introduced fast from the store delivery expensive - for those who need 4 hours.
• All questions like, “do you have such and such?” Began to be recorded and also redirected to the purchase in the daily report.

Result: we learned a lot of new and interesting things and reduced the number of cancellations almost by half - and these are dozens of orders a day even in the off-season, in the summer.

What is important

The first lesson of obesity - you need to maximize delegate solutions to where the problem occurs. In any hierarchical company, questions still reach the top, and then go back. The correct phrase is “I do not have the right and competence to decide for you, you are the performer”. For a number of reasons, we went half way - first, we sharply truncated the hierarchy with the division of companies, and only then began to introduce something more modern. Now we are just at the stage of experiments with a new architecture, while it’s too early to talk about the results.

The second lesson of obesity - you need to communicate faster. Telegram in silent mode - the perfect story, if you need to clarify something. Telegram chats are excellent project trackers, if you talk on business. The agreement in the telegram is generally speed fiction. I still do not believe many, but I believe that the mail - it is old slow sucks. I note that just a couple of years ago I was categorically against any instant messengers.

The third lesson of obesity - the goal should be visible everywhere and to everyone. If we decide that customer focus is more important than short-term profit, then this is what we need to do. For example, the buyer came at 21:01, and we seem to be closing. What to do - let in or close? Of course, let in. The buyer came, asked us for a specific game, which we do not have. What to do? Find this game in another store (even if it is from a competitor) - and send the buyer there. And in the purchasing department inform that there was a request for such a product that we could not satisfy. Because there is a goal. This should be understood by everyone in the store. That is, not to have a set of rules for all occasions, but to know how these rules are derived.

The fourth lesson is monitoring progress. When you honestly admit where you are now, and have already conveyed to everyone the goal - you need to watch how you can go to it. This is a regular reporting system - no matter what bureaucracy seems, it is needed. These are plans. This is communication with competitors and coordination of actions. This is a lot more.

Well, and more. In the eyes of every new customer, we start everything from scratch - no matter how we serve all the previous ones. All 10 years of experience mean nothing. Every new person is everything from scratch. You can not go on fame, no matter how positive it is.

We shook up the team for the year, changed the pace of work, again saw the burning eyes of many. Most importantly, we were small and fast again. If more correct - a cluster of small and fast companies. We again achieved good combat effectiveness, but continue to restructure the company. And I'm not sure that the way we work now is the apotheosis of good governance. We will most likely redo everything a couple of times.

And, of course, in the course of the changes, we again cut shoals, for which in places it is very shameful. Here are a couple of months as the newsletter was sent to partners, where I added a fish about the place of negotiations - it was not changed, and the “Business meeting will be held in the gateway at McDuck's”. I laughed and hit my head on the table. And such moments - every week. This, let's say, gives a light pleasant hue of madness to everything that happens.

In general, I think our next annual cycle will be fun. Highly.