Performance and capacity are elements that contribute to the success of our business, but are often overlooked.
We make efforts to ensure our product or service is valuable, focus on creating a great customer experience and market ourselves, but the infrastructure and systems that power the day to day operations just don’t get the same amount of focus.
Do you have a good understanding of whether your technology (hardware and software) is working at its optimum performance for each employee? Is your team working at their optimum productivity, or is the performance of your systems slowing them down?
If you aren’t regularly monitoring the performance and capacity of your technology against what you business requires, you may be doing your employees, and in turn your business, a disservice.
Performance
The most important measure of computer performance from a business’s perspective is how fast your computer allows its user (your employees) to work on their day to day activities.
Below are some questions to ask your employees (and yourself!), in order to gauge the current performance of your workstation, server or network:
- How quickly does your computer start up in the morning from a shutdown state?
- How many applications can you have open at a time without slowing your computer to a halt?
- How long it take for you to open a file from the shared file server?
- How long it takes to load/open an application, like Microsoft Word?
- How long it takes for a normal website to load?
By answering these questions you can determine your current baseline performance. The aim is then to improve to a level that meets your budgetary and productivity requirements.
Performance is an often under-appreciated concept by business. There is a clear link between higher performance and a greater potential for your employees to get more done in the time they have (more productivity), so it is important to take seriously.
Capacity
Closely related to the performance of your technology, managing your technology capacity is equally important! Capacity is measured by the amount of resources available for everyone in the office to perform their role at an optimal level.
For example, on an individual level, do you have enough space on your hard drive for all the files you are creating over time? Do you have enough space for the next 6-12 months worth of files? On a network or server level, does your environment have enough capacity to cater for a new employee, or an extra application?
Ensuring that you are planning and appropriately increasing capacity to meet the needs of the business prevents delays and downtime in productivity.
In the next article, we will cover the best way to monitor performance and capacity, and what are the key components and hardware specifications that translate to higher performance and easy capacity management.
If you have questions or are concerned about the current performance and capacity of your business, speak to us! Call 08 7070 0900 or email [email protected].
